I first became familiar with Scott Cheshire’s writing through a very funny essay he’d written called “The Good, the Bad and Bumping Uglys” the tagline for which read: “Some thoughts on masturbation, Norman Mailer, and the Good Book.” Everything you ever wanted to know about Scott but were afraid to ask might well be contained in it. Which is to say that I was somewhat familiar with the basics of Scott’s biography—being raised in a Jehovah’s Witness household, his time spent giving sermons as an adolescent—when his galley arrived last fall. Unlike that essay, however, the novel seemed so serious, dark and full of apocalyptic wonder—just consider the cover itself, the flames!—a contrast to what I’d read earlier. And I slowly came to realize that this is one Scott’s strengths as writer, and as a person: the balancing act between the light and the dark.

Beneath all the eschatology of High as the Horses’ Bridles, there is an honest attempt to capture the human condition using language that is both assured and original, in a way I had not seen done in quite so vulnerable a way. This vulnerability shines through on almost every page.

More importantly, that same sense of humor I’d previously glimpsed was present throughout as well. This is a funny book, though it’s not necessarily always fun. It’s sad and mournful, incredibly tender, particularly in the interactions between a father and son. This is a story about love, first and foremost. One of my favorite and most memorable lines affirm this: “I’m not so sure faith is a thing that can ever be lost. Like every love we have, there’s always remnants deep inside us, in our cells.” For anyone has struggled with their own faith, or with love, you’ll realize how true this is.

Scott brings this struggle to the surface in a personal way while dealing with cosmic themes like time, life and death, the end of the world. This was an exciting book for me to read, primarily because I’d never read anything quite like it. And for that reason alone, I am very grateful to him for writing it.

I was asked to interview Scott in person at McNally Jackson on July 9. What follows are highlights from that conversation. But what’s missing is Scott’s real-time thoughtful delivery of his answers, not to mention his signature entertaining style of making words and scripture and pop culture come alive through a kind of spoken word that feels like a performance.

Paul W. Morris: For me, High as the Horses’ Bridles is a love story. And like the best love stories, it’s heartbreaking, full of tenderness and loss. It’s all about endings, the end of days, the end of relationships, the end of lives, which sometimes end very suddenly, sometimes mysteriously. It’s cosmic in scale, but also intimate, incredibly relevant to the present day. And so I’m wondering about beginnings. Can you talk about the genesis of the novel (pun not necessarily intended)?

Scott Cheshire: The genesis of the novel comes from my own time as a kid preacher, which I should say is not at all exotic within that culture. And that was a long time ago. But a few years ago I had a dream, and it was the dream of a vast and decorative ceiling, and on that ceiling was painted stars, the sun, moon, and heavens. I woke up wondering why. That day, I started writing what eventually became the book. And its working title was always “The Ends,” which served as something of a beacon for me while writing. I knew that no matter what the book was about “ends” in themselves; and so hopefully no matter how discursive the book might seem, it’s actually quite focused. Only it’s less plot-focused than it is consciousness-focused. It’s a book about, among other things, our human urge to frame time, to give it narrative shape. And we all do this, every day, in our own lives. At some point “The Ends” became the title of the middle section of the book (there are three sections).

As far as you calling this a love story, I say hurrah because for me it’s about love in every way. And not simply the love and loss between Josie and his ex-wife, or the love between Josie and his Dad, but about the root love at the core of religion or philosophy at their best. Love of knowledge, love for God—or maybe a better way to put it: God is love, which also means, of course, love is God.

PM: The writing is powerful, the language dark, mystical, and motivating. There is a performative aspect to preaching, which you capture so well on the page. I’m curious about how that translates when you’re alone, writing without an audience, as opposed to speaking to an assembly. How much of your own experience giving sermons informed the story?

SC: Well, thank you for saying so. For one, I want a story to feel as if it comes from a human mouth and so I read aloud everything I write to get that feeling. I pace back and forth in my apartment and read and re-read aloud trying to get a distinct feeling. In the case of Josie’s voice, I wanted it to read like spoken thoughtful language. As far as the opening section, I wanted it to have the cadence of a sermon, which is similar in some ways to the cadence of fast-paced plot. It’s about keeping a listener or reader enrapt. My own time on the stage was not nearly as exciting as Josie’s. But I remember the preparation, the fear, a little bit of the power. I wanted the reader to feel all of that, but I also wanted to deliver as much of a religious feeling within the reader as I could. To lift them up high and let them drop.

PM: Your main character Josiah/Josie is remembering his life from seemingly far off and away, looking back on the events of his childhood and even adulthood, narrating this story. But who is he talking to? Sometimes the readers sense the narrator’s own confusion, like Josiah knows he might be misremembering things. And he himself even acknowledges this at one point when he says, “Nostalgia can be dangerous.” What’s so dangerous about remembering the past for you?

SC: Well, for one, the past is almost always wrong. Our memory of it I mean. Some memories are really comfy romantic fibs we tell ourselves. They’re part of the life narrative we daily construct. And sometimes we retrofit. Don’t get me wrong—I also definitely have the melancholy impulse toward nostalgia. When I was sixteen and I had The Cure (probably Seventeen Seconds) playing on my Walkman, I definitely prayed a gray rain would come down falling, while telling myself life was so much better last year… But nostalgia literally means “homesickness,” you know? It’s an impulse rooted in pain, a longing and romanticization for what we can no longer have.

And it’s interesting what you say about the narrator of this story. Who is talking? Who is he talking to? I’m very driven as a reader by an authoritative voice—one that sounds like he or she is completely in charge and I will believe anything at all they say, no matter how odd or problematic. I’m sure it has something to do with growing up in a Bible-based culture, wherein the Truth of the authorial voice is taken for granted becauseGod wrote the book. Erich Aurbach in Mimesis writes beautifully about the phenomenon of the Godly voice in scripture—and how with the epic poem and of course the novel later on there is a tremendous paradigmatic shift. When I started writing in earnest, for years I struggled with that tension. How do I convince a reader that this is “true?” And so at some point I embraced the fact that Josie is trying to figure things out (as we all are, really) and that required a voice that doubted itself, even contradicted itself. He’s recounting his life, and so this means he’s doing his best to remember how things happen, and he is trying to shape those memories, to give them meaning. This is what it is to be human. So who’s he talking to? I guess he’s talking to you.

PM: There is the real threat of abandonment running through the novel. Especially with the child abductions, the kids faces on milk cartons. How much did the idea of The Rapture, that only the worthy would be saved, inform your sense of the future when writing this?

SC: The rapture is a fascinating concept, not one I grew up with (it’s not part of the Witness tradition), but what a story. I know that as a writer I am ultimately interested in death, and I don’t mean that in anyway other than as a writer I am interested in the highest stakes possible. As a reader and a writer I am compelled and propelled by the need for making meaning. And if there were no death, there would be such need. And yet death is void, a nothing, a “no-thing”—as far as we know anyway—and so it’s difficult to explore dramatically. Whereas the notion of the missing, children on milk-boxes, the rapture, etc., is in some ways is the closest we can get to dramatizing a loss of existence. It’s also strangely comforting, even as I find it disturbing. It implies hope, no matter how faint. Not to mention, it’s a book that partly tales place in the 1980’s, and that fear abounded in the 80’s, that of missing children, I mean. It’s also a dread tension that pairs well with exploring apocalyptic anxieties, which is also a way of getting close to death, without ever actually experiencing it. The Cold War was marked perhaps most by its inactivity, its penultimate face-offs and nuclear threats that always allowed yet another day to pass.

PM: Hillary Clinton was recently asked in an interview about the most influential book she’s read, and she said the Bible, adding, “I still find it a source of wisdom, comfort and encouragement.” But the Bible in your novel is not all that comforting. It’s bloody and apocalyptic, just consider what the title refers to. Where does the Bible sit for you in terms of being an influential work?

SC: With all due respect, I don’t think she’s read the whole book. And I don’t mean that as disparaging to her or the Bible. I mean it’s sort of like the person who claims Moby Dick as their favorite novel, and yet you cannot help getting the sense they’ve never actually finished it. Except of course a whole lot more claim the Bible than Moby Dick, which is something we should really consider since these same people tend to run the western world and use it as a “how-to manual.” They usually avoid mentioning the genocides of the Old Testament (or the Hebrew Bible, more properly called), and they always run from Revelation. Even Popes have! As far as influence, it’s in my blood–the language, the complexity, the formative narrative germs. I don’t read it as much as I used to, except for certain parts. But I’m also attracted to the apocryphal works. To steal from Emerson, the Bible is certainly part of the Over-soul, it’s alive in the air and allows for a tremendous cultural resonance from Ms. Clinton’s favorite books to the work of Cormac McCarthy. It’s part of who we are. It has partly shaped what it means to be human, and truly reveals itself to be utterly human when one reads it for the strange and disturbing beautiful library it is. It’s timeless and dangerously of its time. Is it divinely inspired? Sure. But no more so than Moby Dick, or any of another fifty favorite books I can name.

PM: Who are some of your favorite contemporary writers? I’m interested to know whether any of these writers share your sympathy with scripture, specifically those dealing with Armageddon.

SC: Predictably, I’m drawn to writers who use the novel to explore belief and doubt, novels like Marilynn Robinson’s Gilead, or Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer. Those are real models for me. Regarding apocalypse, I’m not especially a reader of books preoccupied with the literal notion of that idea. I enjoy them, yes, books like McCarthy’s The Road, or Edan Lipiuki’s California, which I am literally reading right now and I can’t put it down, or even say Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle. But as a writer I’m less interested in the “end of the world” than I am in our undying human attraction to that story. Josie’s dad—and more than anything else, this is a book about a guy and his dad—is relentlessly taken with the notion. It nourishes him, even as it’s killing him. He’s a sad man, a driven man, maybe a disturbed man, but he isn’t crazy. He is a manifest distortion of a very basic human drive.

PM: Yours is a unique take on time. Some events seem to stretch out forever, like the mother’s sickness and also several perambulations through Queens and on California beaches, opportunities which give the narrator time for deep reflection. And then there’s other times people are just suddenly gone in a blink. Even Josiah’s flashbacks take a circuitous route, finding their way through the story in a roundabout way. “Everything is on the way to everything” is one memorable line that comes to mind when considering this. Can you talk a little bit about your conception of time and how it affects the characters in the book? Especially with the end of the world right around the corner…

SC: Well it’s a book about something not happening, which is the enemy for a novelist. Things must happen. So I started manipulating time and how Josie experiences time in ways that might provide the dramatic tension one wants in a novel. They just happen to happen in the wrong order. But there’s a more meaningful reason for it, too. The apocalyptic perspective is one that imbues every living day with acute meaning: this is all leading somewhere, and that somewhere is a grand operatic ending. Cue explosions, music… (which is not so far off from life in 1980’s Cold War America) And yet that is not how the average person lives in the world, not even the average believer lives this way. But Josie does. Or did, anyway. The shifts in time try and exemplify his wrestling with daily normal waking life, with present time. I think you’ll find that the more he comes to love, and to know love, the better he is at living. In fact, I’m trying to learn from him now.

PM: Speaking of time, how long did it take you to write the novel?

SC: About seven years, start to finish, six proper to write it. Novels take a long time. They’re hard! And yet all I can think about is writing another one. My poor wife…

PM: You play a bit with polarities in the book, good versus evil, time being infinite, but also finite, and the fine line that exists between fanatics and those who may well be divinely inspired. You seem to be saying that it’s all a matter of perspective, or of belief. In the end, you arrive at a balance of sorts, or a marriage of the extremes, summed up beautifully when Josiah carries his invalid father through the doorway and across the threshold of his home. Can you describe what arriving at the center was like?

SC: It’s definitely a fine line. I mean what real difference is there between the voice that speaks to a prophet, a madman, or a novelist? The volume? Who’s to say the madman hasn’t had good ideas come to him? I’ve certainly had bad ones. I don’t know where any of this comes from, truly. Mailer called writing “the spooky art.” As far as how I came to that moment, which you beautifully and I think rightly refer to as a marriage, I don’t know. I know this though: at some point I knew the book would be comprised of three visions, one for each section, and in one of them Josie would share in witnessing a vision with his father, so to speak. Giving me that shared place to aim for demanded a critical but respectful balance.

PM: Let’s talk about pop culture in the novel. It’s full of references to classic TV shows and movies, which grounds your story fully in the 80s, like Thundarr the Barbarian and The Day After, both radically different post-apocalyptic in their way. Most notably, there are nearly two dozen references to Star Wars (I counted!), most notably when you describe Josie’s father looking like an older Luke Skywalker, or when his mother takes Josie to see the film and she tells him that while it’s an exciting story, that future will never be able to happen, because Armageddon will already have arrived by then (nevermind that Star Wars takes place “long ago, in a galaxy far, far away…”). Besides being the quintessential sci-fi film from your own childhood, was Star Wars a conscious choice? Afterall, it is ultimately about a father and a son, and about a family’s legacy.

SC: Star Wars! Boy, did I love Star Wars as a kid. I was a card-carrying member of the fan club and an avid reader of Bantha Tracks, the official newsletter. Wow. Even now as I think of that time snaps up like a trap, or maybe better I say it folds like a wormhole. As a kid, the idea of a new Star Wars twenty years away functioned a lot like prophecy, and the jargon and imagery of the trilogy informed what a lot of young kids imagined the future to look like. All wrong of course. Plus, there’s something just plain biblical about Star Wars, about it’s mythic take on the father/son dynamic.

Not to mention pop culture in general is interesting. It’s often the wider culture’s first attempt at understanding itself. I can promise you decades from now there will be—if there isn’t already—Kardashian exegesis. And why? Because it’s all story. The Day After was a made for TV movie about America trying to understand the Cold War while living within it. That is ambitious stuff. And it’s about family. Does it stay? Is it “news that stays news,” to borrow Pound’s definition of literature? Well, I would say that entirely depends on who’s reading what. I happen to find 1980’s cartoons and early punk rock as rich material as any for thinking through story. And yes I know this veers dangerously toward nostalgia.

PM: We started talking this interview talking about beginnings, so I think it’s only fitting that we end by talking about endings. Finally. You chose to go back two hundred years to start a seemingly entirely new story, although there’s a shared DNA there. Why did you decide to go there, especially when so much of the novel was about looking forward, ahead, to the future? Were you tempted to keep that new narrative going? Could you?

SC: It was the last thing I wrote, and while the preceding pages took me about five years to write, that last fifty sort of just poured out in about a month. I spent the next few months trying to make it work earlier in the novel until I realized it actually made sense there in the end. Why? Because it denies the linear apocalyptic time frame, I think, and it makes a case for a more circular portrait of existence. I hope it deepens a reader’s understanding of the Laudermilk family. And I hope it provides a surprisingly varied and complex look into our national religious heritage. We are a weird and wonderful heterogeneous country. Our beginnings even more so.

PM: For that matter, there’s an attention to detail in that final section, as there is throughout the book, that’s steeped in otherworldliness. Have you considered covering any of this ground through nonfiction, either through essay or memoir?

SC: I tried. But the truth I look for is factual and emotional. I want a story that is true to experience—mine, and those of others; true to history—mine, and that of others; and true like the foundation of a house. The novel does it like no other form.

PM: What’s next for you?

SC: A new book, and one probably obsessed with similar subject matter. God, love, death, family, good, and evil. The big stuff. What else is there?

Scott Cheshire is the author of the debut novel High as the Horses’ Bridles, published this month by Henry Holt. Scott will be reading tonight at Powell’s City of Books on Burnside at 7:30pm.

Paul W. Morris is the Director of Membership, Marketing & Literary Awards at PEN American Center.

]]>http://www.tinhouse.com/blog/36010/alphas-omegas-fathers-sons-a-conversation-with-scott-cheshire.html/feed1Anthems for a Book Tourhttp://www.tinhouse.com/blog/35956/anthems-for-a-book-tour.html
http://www.tinhouse.com/blog/35956/anthems-for-a-book-tour.html#commentsSun, 20 Jul 2014 16:00:17 +0000http://www.tinhouse.com/blog/?p=35956Tonight I’ll be standing in a room of people and, for all I know, the only thing they’ll know about me is that I’m the woman wrote that one book, the one about getting kidnapped and raped by a man I used to love. I’ll stand in lots of rooms like this over the next few weeks — months, if I’m lucky — talking about the one story that has defined much of my adult life. I’ll be honest: at my weakest moments, I feel completely terrified of exposing myself in this very public way — by which I mean not only talking about such a personal experience to complete and total strangers, but also appearing in specific advertised places, at specific advertised times. Anyone could find me. Anyone.

The songs on this playlist have one thing in common: they remind me to be brave. They’re songs about strength, and righteousness, and self-determination, and even as I listen right now, these songs remind me who I am today. I am a woman who speaks up, who fights back, who doesn’t take shit from anyone. Yes, I’m also a woman who is — every day of my life — waging a battle against my own fear. These songs remind me that I’m winning.

Lacy M. Johnson is the author of The Other Side and Trespasses: A Memoir, and she is co-artistic director of the location-based storytelling project [the invisible city]. She lives in Houston with her husband and children.

]]>http://www.tinhouse.com/blog/35956/anthems-for-a-book-tour.html/feed1Plotto: The Master Book of All Plots by William Wallace Cookhttp://www.tinhouse.com/blog/35760/plotto-the-master-book-of-all-plots-by-william-wallace-cook.html
http://www.tinhouse.com/blog/35760/plotto-the-master-book-of-all-plots-by-william-wallace-cook.html#commentsFri, 18 Jul 2014 14:00:20 +0000http://www.tinhouse.com/blog/?p=35760

In 1928, dime novelist William Wallace Cook took to heart “Purpose, opposed by Obstacle, yields Conflict” in his how-to manual, Plotto: The Master Book of All Plots. The compilation includes 1,462 extensively diagrammed plots. Here are a few gems to get your Friday off to a productive start:

A pretends that a wax figure, X, is his wife

B pretends to be wealthy and merely masquerading as a shop girl

A, whenever he attempts to have X, a certain object of mystery, explained to him, meets with misfortune

B is convinced that several eligible men are in love with her

A finds himself under a weird psychic spell because of a birthmark on the face of his wife, B

B, out in a storm on a pitch-dark night, receives a proposal of marriage. Unable to see her lover, and scarcely able to hear him, she nevertheless accepts—and meets with a disagreeable surprise

A is married to an unknown woman by an insane clergyman at the point of a gun

William Wallace Cook was born in Marshall, Michigan, in 1867. He was the author of a memoir, The Fiction Factory, as well as dozens of Westerns and science-fiction novels, many of which were adapted into films. He was nicknamed “the man who deforested Canada” for the volume of stories he fed into the pulp-magazine mill. He spent five years composing Plotto before finally publishing it in 1928. Cook died in his hometown of Marshall in 1933.

Last spring, I taught an undergraduate fiction workshop that differed significantly from any other workshop I’ve taught or taken: I tried to have my students mimic the process I go through when writing a story. In most workshops, students are charged with creating two or three short stories in the course of fifteen weeks. But I myself have never written three short stories in a semester—at least, not since graduate school, when I was in a workshop that demanded it of me. I don’t know many writers for whom three stories in fifteen weeks is a habit, but somehow in workshops it’s become the procedure. The fact that that doesn’t replicate my own process seemed sort of weird after a while.

So I decided I would make an experiment with my students to have them go through the full process of creating a piece, taking the story from inception through stages of revision to its eventual polished ending. I insisted that they undertake the process of writing that I myself undertake. I dictated the stages, it’s true, but I am the teacher, and that’s my prerogative. It proved for an interesting semester, and I’m going to refer to what happened in the class as I present the process here. I’m also going to illustrate the process with a hypothetical story I wrote as I moved through the stages of the exercise with my class. So these are the threads being braided or woven or tied in knots in the course of this essay. I hope it doesn’t get confusing.

On the first day of class, I had my students write a five-hundred-word piece about an event that actually happened to them and that they understood was a story, something they’d tell in a bar or on a plane or to a friend. I had them write it in the first person and I capped it at five hundred words. The thing that I wrote, when we sat down to do this, began, “When I was five, my family was in a tornado,” which is true. That happened to me. My family was inside a car, in Kansas; all of us were there, including my little sister in utero. There are a lot of us, five children and my mom and dad. My little brother and I were three and five, and we were in what is called the “wayback” of the station wagon. We were on our way home from dinner at a restaurant in early September, and we saw lightning strike. We pulled into a parking lot and watched roofs ripped off houses, rain pouring down hard, and the wires from electric poles snapping on the ground. In the parking lot—this was at a strip mall—there was a Baskin-Robbins ice-cream parlor, and I can still remember the image of all the people behind the plate glass licking their ice-cream cones and looking out at us in our car in the parking lot, a parking lot that was full of cars, yet ours was the only one that had people in it, and ours was also the only one that was lifted up and turned over by the tornado—twice. With us inside it. We all survived.

You can see how this would strike a person who’d gone through it as a story worth telling, right? That’s a story! So there’s my autobiographical event. I had my students write about their own autobiographical event, some nugget of narrative that they intuitively understood had meaning. I wanted the event to be autobiographical because it’s important that writers have an investment in and an attachment to their stories, as well as some authority over them. They need to write what they know, what they care about. The tornado, in my family, was a defining event in our lives. I told that story for years and years and years.

But the autobiographical event needs to be given some freedom to become art, so the next step is to allow that story fictional leeway, because art is best if it’s not hampered by the constraints of factual anecdote. The next step for my students was to occupy the point of view of a third-person character related to the event and not the person they were in relationship to the event. They had to posit another character to oversee the story. In this way, the material is approached from a new angle, opening up the possibility for fiction.

In my own case, I didn’t want to be stuck in the point of view of a five-year-old. My pressing concern in 1966—when I was that age and in that tornado—was that I not wet myself. It was deeply important to me that I not pee my pants while we were in the ambulance. That’s a five-year-old’s concern.

And so, for my story, I would occupy the point of view of my father, or the father, he, him, the third-person character who was driving the car on the night the tornado happened and who was, oddly enough, the same age then as I am now, which puts me in the curious position of having intimacy with that point of view. I’m more likely to be the driver of a car full of people these days than I was then, obviously, and now I understand what it must have been like for my father to be the parent driving a car that’s then tossed into a tornado.

When I began occupying the point of view of the character who was my father, I realized that I didn’t want to set the story in 1966 because I don’t know what it was like to be an adult in 1966. I would set the story in the now, so that I could write from the point of view of an adult now. Would I place it in New Mexico or Colorado, where I live? No, because we don’t have very many tornadoes in the places where I live. I would keep the story in Kansas. So I’m combining the fictional, in that I inhabit the story from the point of view of a third-person character who isn’t me, with the factual, putting the story in a place where the event that I wish to write about actually happened. This merging of what is personal and what is fictional, what is factual and what is made up, starts happening for me in the process of writing a story.

That was a thousand-word draft. Every time my students went through a revision, I upped the word count by five hundred. It was an arbitrary, but manageable, number. By creating multiple drafts (by my insisting that each revision was its own draft and had only to attend to the requirements laid out for that draft), students revised with a single objective each time. The clarity of writing with a single objective seemed helpful. All the stages were accompanied by literature that provided examples, so we could talk about the stories they were reading, the writers they were modeling. And with every draft, they workshopped the pieces in small groups that changed with each revision so that they had new eyes on their material at each stage.

The third step—I’ve got a point of view, and I’m invested in this story I’m creating—is to put some sort of clock on the story. What is a clock, in the vocabulary of story making? It can be any of a variety of things, but ultimately it is a shaping device through which you signal to the reader the time they have to spend with your characters. For instance, the clock can be a road trip. If you set characters in motion on page one and they are traveling across the country, the story would be over by the time they arrive to their destination. Using a literal clock, the clock that dictates the day, is an impulse people seem to resort to very naturally when they sit down to write. There are many stories that begin with someone waking up—you’ve probably been tempted to write one of those yourself. It makes sense to me that consciousness, or the sudden arrival of awareness, would be a starting point for a story, which suggests then that darkness or nightfall, sleep and the release of consciousness, would mean the end of a story. The clock can be the time line of an hour, a day, a weekend, a summer. A ceremony is a clock; a ritual is a clock. Starting with the preparations for a large party—in the instance of, say, Clarissa Dalloway in Mrs. Dalloway—of course leads to the book ending with the party.

You can also use a clock in the way that Alice Munro claims to construct stories, with the notion of there being a house through which someone is wandering, so that the shape of the story becomes a house whose rooms must be visited and understood. You can use Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey, the duration of a friendship, or the stages of grief as a clock. Anything can become a clock. You just need to find one that suits your story. I recommend you look to the works you love and see how they begin and end and how the construction and movement of time gives them some sort of shape.

For the clock in my story, I asked myself, Do I want to write about the day of the tornado itself? Or am I interested in something other than that? Writing about the actual tornado reminded me of that not-as-fascinating-as-it-might-sound conflict: man vs. nature, and while the dramatic business of being tossed around in the car was fascinating, it doesn’t really lead me, here and now, to a story I’d be likely to write. I would be more inclined to dwell in the aftermath. Here’s why:

In the true aftermath of our tornado, there was a photograph that some AP photographer took of me and my dad being hauled to an ambulance. It appeared on the front page of our local newspaper—the Wichita Eagle—which correctly identified us. But when the photo appeared on the wire and then in stories around the country, the caption read, “Young Toni Nelson with unidentified man.” For weeks following the tornado, my dad kept getting these weird letters and phone calls “identifying” him. People would call and say, “That’s my long-lost brother.” Or husband. Or son. All over the country this “unidentified” man, who was my father, kept being identified. Wrongly. He was none of those people. And that’s kind of cool to me, and it makes me think, as an adult looking back, Well, there’s something to interrogate.

Of course, another factual thing is that my mother was pregnant, and so in the interval between September, when the tornado happened, and October, when my sister Julie was born, we wondered if the baby was going to be okay. Everything indicated she would be okay, but it was nerve-racking. So I think that is the clock I would put on that particular story—the aftermath of the tornado, the immediate effects of anxiety, my character’s concern about what his wife is going to experience and whether the baby will be normal while receiving these odd updates on who he is from around the country.

My students had to attach a clock to their stories that made some kind of sense with the material they were writing about. It had to have some bearing; it had to be something that was built into the anecdote they had started with.

I then asked my students to go through the material they had written thus far and identify the props and objects that would be of use to them in the story. The props and objects draft was a draft of detail-making. Some of the props might become red herrings, but some might be of use. The students’ only charge was to chronicle what was (or could become) useful objects in their stories. In my own story, that photograph became a kind of prop or tangible object to take advantage of, to play with, and also perhaps to be used to dictate the terms of the clock in the story. I also had the bashed-up car, the ice-cream cones being licked by people behind a window, and an unidentified man who’s being misidentified.

The next step was to determine the protagonist’s age. In addition to imposing a clock on a story, determining the proper age for the protagonist is, I think, one of the story maker’s biggest decisions. Imagine a time line, a line whose beginning is a person’s birth and whose end is that person’s death, then imagine significant mile markers along the way. These are markers that have their sources in several factors: physical, psychological, sociological, biological, intellectual, et cetera. They are not firm markers, but approximate ones. At certain moments in our lives we face transitions. Ideally, the central character in a short story is in a transitional situation. If you can sync your character with a sociological or otherwise traditional transitional moment, you will have a more powerful position from which to illustrate your character’s dilemma. So it’s important to know the age of your protagonist, because the transitions that happen to us are sometimes of our own engineering, but oftentimes, they are products of a cultural or biological or social transitional moments, and if you can match those up with your character, you’re going to have a story that makes use of the proper time for the proper transition. Or, conversely, you will create a powerful distortion because the transitional moment is inappropriate; it’s wrongly placed. For example, sexual knowledge that comes at age nine or ten is not properly placed and so becomes a disrupted transitional moment.

Here are some basic transitional ages. Age three or four: your first memory, the first time you begin owning your life through an ongoing series of memories. That seems to me quite significant. Five years old begins a sort of social transition. You become a kid who goes to school. Eight years old—well, if the kids are like mine and you drive the way I do, they start pointing out to you how you’re speeding and it’s very upsetting to them because you’re breaking the law and they know you are, and they can’t reconcile that their good mom would be doing this bad thing. They turn into little cops in your car. William Faulkner’s story “Barn Burning” makes use of that particular transitional age. The child protagonist is, roughly, eight or nine years old. His brother is twelve, and his other sibling is younger, about five. The story is his story precisely because he’s at a moment when he must either commit to the family’s way of living, which is to burn down barns and then go to some other place and get accused of burning down barns but always get out of it, or he has to say that his father burns down barns, in which case he’s taking a stand against his father. For him, this is a hugely conflicted moment, because he knows what’s right by law, and he knows what’s right by family, and they aren’t the same thing. For him, this is a conflict that’s genuinely of consequence. The five-year-old sibling does not care, cannot see it, and the twelve-year-old has already stepped over the line. The story could only be happening to this eight- or nine-year-old child. A transitional moment—cognitive, social, whatever—is very useful in situating your story.

Let me illustrate this another way. If you said to somebody, “This is a story about a son who lives with his mother,” there’s no obvious conflict built into that situation, or expectation about it, until you name an age. He’s ten: of course he lives with his mother. He’s fifteen: naturally he lives with his mother. He’s twenty-one: well, who knows, he might go to college someday. He’s thirty-five: he really ought to move out of his mother’s house. He’s fifty-seven: there’s something very wrong with him. Or with his mother. Or both. What age will give a story the most hinging power? Let’s say you want to write about a woman who’s worried about not being pregnant. She’s thirty. Okay, I’m sympathetic to a point. Age thirty-five, I’m a little more sympathetic. Age forty-one? I’m worried for her. You’ve increased the pressure of the situation merely by aging her a bit. So consider a character’s time line. You’re probably going to write only one story about this character; make sure you’ve got her at the right transitional moment to tell her story.

Maybe every story ought to be a coming-of-age story, in that coming-of-age stories are always about the reluctance or difficulty of passing into the next phase. The most common passage in a coming-of-age story is adolescence, but there are many other passages. The best coming-of-age stories are ones in which a character has to make a passage but regrets or fears or fights against having to do it, because once you’ve reached the other side, once you know what you don’t want to know (this seems to me to be the crux of every Hemingway story; the guy resists—No, I don’t wanna know that. No, I don’t wanna know it.) you can never unknow it. You pass a point of no return.

So back to my own example: I’ve decided my father character is in his middle age and he, like my own father, is an atheist. After the tornado, people would say, “You’re so lucky. You’re so lucky.” And my father’s reply was, “How is it lucky that of all those empty cars in the parking lot, our car was the only one picked up?” What’s interesting to me about this is that the fact of being selected, it seems, by a tornado, in a parking lot full of vehicles, and being turned over and dashed about, might give an atheist some pause. The middle-aged father character, having long established a sense of self and beliefs, is suddenly challenged by the thoughts that maybe there is a God, maybe he is an “unknown” person, is it time to change his life? And so this would become, for me, a way of inhabiting the character further.

We were in week eight or so of the class at this point. I asked my students to take the most recent draft and introduce a world event into it. Something from the world had to come into their story. It could be as simple as sending the characters to a Halloween party or as complex as having the characters evacuate after Hurricane Katrina. I asked them to insert something of the world into the story to see how that gave them an outside influence for their characters to do battle with. When a world event enters a story, it creates a new dynamic. Oftentimes my own work has been accused of being too insular, too negligent of the larger world, too much about the privacy and smallness of family. So in an effort to challenge myself, I decided I would use the events of 9/11 to inform my story. The actual tornado had happened at the same time of year, September, so the decision was somewhat organic. Let’s say that the tornado happened on September 5 and then the World Trade Center gets attacked on September 11. How is that useful to me in terms of navigating some new material in the story? Well, I think—and this is purely speculative; I’ve not actually written this story—it would be interesting to consider the ways in which an attack on America driven by religious fervor might affect a man who doesn’t believe in God. As in: what is the power of belief? That might be something I’d begin speculating about in the story if I decided to use 9/11. And if 9/11 were too dramatic an event to enter this story, I might set the story on the anniversary of 9/11, a year later. Or maybe the five-year anniversary would further defuse the overwhelming power of 9/11. This is the stage my students really resisted, and in a couple of instances, it didn’t make a better draft of the story, but by and large, it did.

I next asked them to divide the elements of their stories into what I call binaries. I’ve quit thinking about short stories as having the traditional conflicts as taught to me in junior high school. Then, it was explained as three choices: man vs. man, man vs. nature, or man vs. himself. It has never been useful to me as a writer to think about conflict that way. But what is useful to me is to start identifying the opposing forces that are providing a piece with some sort of energy or tension. And that, I think, is conflict. In Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” for example, there is the Misfit, who has a very concrete understanding of the Bible, and there is the grandmother, who has a very abstract adherence to the tenets of the Bible. There is the empty sky, and there is the ground occupied by the characters. There is the sense of violence and the sense of passivity, travel and stasis, the right thing, the wrong thing, Jesus and the devil, the living and the dead. Faithfulness and a lack of faith. And so on. These are oppositional forces, and they create tension and conflict within that story. So I asked my students to start making sure they had binary forces at work in their pieces. If they supplied one part of the binary, they needed to have the other part ready. They needed to understand that there would be something missing if they didn’t fulfill the binary—that tension requires both parts.

The next draft involved creating a traditional story arc, that quite reliable Freytag’s Pyramid you probably also were taught about in junior high school. I want to emphasize that story arc, the idea of rising action, is not about plot, in my experience of writing, but about the writer’s ability to keep creating tension and meaning by upping the ante and raising the stakes as the story proceeds.

An example of this is “Sonny’s Blues,” by James Baldwin, which takes place over about a two-year period and has no discernible plot—none. It’s a series of recollections, events, encounters, but it does not have a plot, or not what you would call a plot. Yet the reader’s investment in that story grows and escalates because of the ways in which Baldwin shapes the story. First, he shapes it with the theme of music. If you trace music throughout the story, the first instance of it being mentioned is a “very complicated” yet “very simple” whistle that the narrator hears on the stairs of the school where he teaches—a boy is whistling. The next instance is music coming from a jukebox in a bar that the narrator passes. This is followed by a mention of music he heard in the past, when his father was playing a guitar. And the next reference, also in the past, is to a piano that his brother, Sonny, played, but that he didn’t hear, because he was off at the war. The next instance is a combo of musicians on the street that is improvising; he’s hearing it from a bit of a distance but he can see that people are moved by it. And the final instance of music is when he is at a bar listening to Sonny play improv with a group—perhaps the most complex and difficult situation of music that exists. So there’s an escalation that accommodates this arc, and it is very deliberate and it accrues power over the course of the story—from the high, thin whistle somebody is just blowing from his mouth to, at the end, a jazz combo performing brilliantly and beautifully. That’s one of the ways the arc in that story is accomplished.

There are other ways, but I’ll just mention one other, which is the presence of Sonny himself. The story begins with the narrator on a subway train, underground, reading about his brother in the newspaper. That’s how distant they are from each other. The next instance is that he runs into a friend of Sonny’s. So it’s some connection to Sonny, but not a literal connection, not a real connection. The next instance is that Sonny writes him a letter. The next instance is that Sonny gets out of jail. The next instances are told in flashbacks. And in the next instance the narrator and Sonny are together, looking out a window, and Sonny tells him it’s so horrible to see all that passion out there on the street. Yet the brothers are still not as intimate as they need to be for the story to fulfill its arc. The final instance is when they’re at the bar and the narrator realizes he is hearing Sonny’s music fully for the first time. It’s hugely powerful, because of this narrative arc. Baldwin is counting on the reader’s ability to take in narrative constructed this way, even though it’s not plot-driven. It’s very important to me to emphasize this, that the shapeliness of fiction almost always depends on the presence of an arc, and it’s not simply a plot-driven device; it’s the ways in which the story creates meaning and emphasizes and amplifies. And it has to work on the reader sneakily or he or she won’t be persuaded. Alongside a traditional story arc, I asked that students also make sure they had at least three scenes (conforming, I suppose, to the notion of beginning, middle, and end).

Toward the end of the semester, because they had read some Donald Barthelme and George Saunders and John Cheever’s “The Swimmer,” I asked my students to try something crazy in their stories to see what happened. Would it be a better story if it were told in the second person? Would it be a better story if it were told in the present tense? Would it be a better story if it were told in reverse chronological order? Would it be a better story if it were told from the dog’s point of view? Do something crazy, I told them, and see if that shakes something loose that you have yet to think about. Make something magical happen in it. Let there be something bizarre. Only one in about one hundred short stories—that I read, anyway—successfully uses some of these quirkier mechanical moves and gestures, and that seemed about right for the class. Only one student made something unrealistic or distorted from a straightforward, conventional story work to his advantage. But it worked really well. He had written about a pet store in a storm, and everybody starts starving, and they all go a little nuts, and the story was well served by allowing the characters a kind of craziness and the animals a bigger sentience than you would think animals would possess. So for him, that was great. For the rest of us, it didn’t work out so well. For example, how would my own story profit if I alternated the point of view with that of the in utero sibling? What was my future sister (my character’s future daughter) experiencing during the tornado? It would be compelling to write, but probably wouldn’t serve the realistic terms of the story.

And then, finally, on the last day of class, I received their stories. The pleasure of reading those heavily revised pieces was singular in my teaching experience. The authors and I alone knew the scenes and anecdotes that had engendered each piece. The manipulations were impressive; the shapeliness of each was solid. The stories were all, to a person, durable and thought provoking. Of course, there is almost always more work to be done. That was never emphasized to me in grad school. I was always just churning out yet another story for workshop rather than going back and truly investing in one story for a lengthy period of time and dedicating myself to making it somehow better. If you are not invested, truly invested, in the fiction you’re making, it will show. The reader will not be invested in it either. Oftentimes when reading fiction, I feel a detachment on the part of the writer toward the material, but when I’m reading the work I love best, I understand that there’s something at risk for the writer in it, that something, whether it’s autobiographical or not, matters to that writer, and that thing really makes some difference. I was tired of my students’ work not seeming to matter enough. I wanted them to be at some risk. What my students took away from that experience is what I hope you take away from this report on it: the work you’re writing is worth your attention and it really is in revision that you’re going to find something meaningful and useful.

Antonya Nelson is the author of four novels, including Bound, and six short story collections, including Nothing Right (Bloomsbury, 2009). Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, Esquire, Harper’s, Redbook and many other magazines, as well as in anthologies such as Prize Stories: the O. Henry Awards and Best American Short Stories. She teaches in the Warren Wilson MFA Program, as well as in the University of Houston’s Creative Writing Program.

]]>http://www.tinhouse.com/blog/35758/short-story-a-process-of-revision-by-antonya-nelson.html/feed7“The Only Solution to the Soul Is the Senses: A Meditation on Bill Murray and Myself” by David Shieldshttp://www.tinhouse.com/blog/35754/the-only-solution-to-the-soul-is-the-senses-a-meditation-on-bill-murray-and-myself-by-david-shields.html
http://www.tinhouse.com/blog/35754/the-only-solution-to-the-soul-is-the-senses-a-meditation-on-bill-murray-and-myself-by-david-shields.html#commentsWed, 16 Jul 2014 14:00:03 +0000http://www.tinhouse.com/blog/?p=35754

I’m in a swoon over Bill Murray because he takes “my issues”— gloom, rage, self-consciousness, world-weariness—and offers ways out, solutions of sorts, all of which amount to a delicate embrace of the real, a fragile lyricism of the unfolding moment. He thus flatters me that under all my protective layers of irony I, too, might have depth of feeling as well. I admire his slouching insouciance but don’t possess it, admire it precisely because I don’t possess it. I realize, of course, that a certain redemptive posture is the unique property of movies and movie stars, but Murray’s grace is manifest at least as often outside his movies as in them. The first line of his book, Cinderella Story: My Life in Golf, is “The light seems to come from everywhere.”

In the last decade there have been a few exceptions—primarily Groundhog Day and Rushmore—but Murray has been so good in so many bad movies that it’s as if he makes bad movies on purpose as a way to demonstrate the truth of Denis Leary’s dictum (to which I subscribe), “Life sucks; get a fuckin’ helmet.” Murray’s movies, in general, suck; he’s the fuckin’ helmet. In a self-interview in which he asked himself to explain why so few of his films have succeeded, he replied, mock-solemnly, “I’ve had lots of good premises.” The Razor’s Edge being, again, an interesting exception, Murray seems to believe that, given the horror show of the universe, the supreme act of bad faith would be to appear in a pretentious work of art aspiring to be beautiful, whereas my impulse has always been to try to find in art my only refuge from the storm.

Murray’s metaphor for the Sisyphean struggle is: “In life, you never have to completely quit. There’s some futile paddling toward some shore of relief, and that’s what gets people through. Only the really lucky get a tailwind that takes them to the shore. So many get the headwind that they fight and, then, tip over and drown.” Life is futile; failure is a sign of grace; Murray is fuck-up as existential fool. His loserdom is the exact opposite, though, of, say, Woody Allen’s, who seems intolerably sniffly by comparison. I’m much, much more like Allen than I am like Murray, which is why I admire Murray (Jewish adoration of un-Jewish stoicism). Asked to name people he finds funny, Murray mentions Bob Hope, David Letterman, Conan O’Brien, Eddie Izzard—WASPy wise guys, goyish slackers, no whiners allowed.

In Meatballs, Murray is counselor at a summer camp for losers. When they’re getting demolished in a basketball game against a much tonier camp, Murray instructs his charges to run around pantsing their opponents. Forget the score; fuck the rules; do fun things; give yourselves things to remember. Camp director Morty takes himself and the camp way too seriously (so many blocking figures in Murray movies are officious Jews; what’s that about—Hollywood’s knee-jerk self-hatred?) and so Murray leads all the other kids in always calling him “Mickey,” turning him into a mouse. The great crime in any Bill Murray movie is self-seriousness, because as Murray’s fellow Irishman Oscar Wilde said, “Life is too important to take seriously.” Wilde also said, “The only solution to the soul is the senses,” which is a key to Murray’s appeal: he’s in touch with his animal self and teaches the kids to be in touch with theirs. We’re all meatballs; we’re all just bodies. If I were a girl or gay, I’d have a searing crush on him in this movie, because just the way he carries his body seems to say Here is fun. I’m where fun happens. When he (crucially: unsuccessfully) courts another counselor, he does so without an ounce of earnestness. Losers are winners; they get that life is an unmitigated disaster. At one point he leads the campers in a chant, “It just doesn’t matter, it just doesn’t matter, it just doesn’t matter.” My problem is that even though I know on an intellectual level that “it just doesn’t matter,” on a daily level I treat everything as if it does.

Murray’s shtick—anti-star Star, anti-hero Hero, ordinary-guy Icon—is built in part upon the fact of his unglamorous appearance. In sketches on Saturday Night Live, Gilda Radner would often call him “Pizza Face,” and it’s obvious he’s never done anything to improve his deeply mottled skin. (Seemingly half my adolescence was spent in a dermatologist’s office.) Murray’s absence of vanity allows him to get to emotional truths in a scene, as opposed to, say, T. Cruise, whom you can tell is always only concentrating on one question: How do I look? I was cute enough as a little kid to appear in an advertisement for a toy store; my father took the photographs, and here I am in the family album, riding a plastic pony and brandishing a pistol with crypto-cowboy charm. Although now I’m certainly not handsome, I don’t think I’ve ever quite outgrown that early narcissism. Murray’s not fat, but he has a serious paunch; as opposed to some middle-aged buffster like Harrison Ford, Murray’s fifty and looks all of it. Bless him for that: it’s a gift back to us; he makes us all feel less shitty. He posed for a New York Times Magazine profile wearing a drooping undershirt and with uncombed, thinning, gray hair. It’s a comparison Murray would surely loathe for its la-di-da-ness, but the photograph reminds me of Rembrandt’s late self-portraits: a famous man who understands his own mortal ordinariness and is willing to show you the irredeemable sadness of his eyes in which that knowledge registers.

Murray’s sadness is not other movie stars’ pseudo-seriousness; he seems genuinely forlorn—always a plus in my book. Speaking to Terry Gross on Fresh Air, Murray said, “Movies don’t usually show the failure of relationships; they want to give the audience a final, happy resolution. In Rushmore, I play a guy who’s aware that his life is not working, but he’s still holding on, hoping something will happen, and that’s what’s most interesting.” Gross, stunned that Murray would identify so strongly with someone as bitter and remorseful as Herman Blume, tried to pull Murray up off the floor by saying, “I mean, you’ve found work that is meaningful for you, though, haven’t you?” Murray explained that Blume is drawn to the energetic teenager Max Fischer, who is the founder and president of virtually every club at Rushmore Academy, but “sometimes it makes you sadder to see someone that’s really happy, really engaged in life when you have detached.” He said this as if he knew exactly what he was talking about.

The Razor’s Edge—a film which he had desperately been wanting to do for years and which he co-wrote—is his ur-story. The first part of the Maugham novel is set in Chicago, but Murray moved the first part of the film to Lake Forest, next door to Wilmette, the North Shore suburb in which he grew up. The bulk of the book and film are set in Paris, where Murray spent a year, studying French and Gurdjieff and fleeing from post-Ghostbusters fame.

Surrounded by cripples and sybarites, amoralists and materialists, Murray’s character in The Razor’s Edge, Larry Darrell, travels to China, Burma, and India searching for meaning, and the best he can come up with is: “You don’t get it. It doesn’t matter.” It just doesn’t matter. Such is the highest wisdom a Murray character can hope to achieve: a sort of semi-Zen detachment, which only deepens his dread (sounds familiar to me).

Angst translates easily to anger. Discussing megalomaniacal celebrities, Murray said, “Whenever I hear someone say, ‘My fans,’ I go right for the shotgun.” In Kingpin, Murray plays an impossibly arrogant bowler who, in one scene, says hello to the two women sitting at the next table. The less attractive woman responds by saying, “Hi,” and Murray says, “Not you [nodding to the less attractive woman]. You [nodding to the more attractive woman].” Murray can access his own cruelty—he ad-libbed these lines—but isn’t defined by it. He simply doesn’t radiate malevolence, as, say, James Woods used to do, but neither is he cuddlesome-cute, à la Tom Hanks; this mixture keeps me productively off balance, makes me unsure whether to embrace him or be slightly afraid of him.

He seizes the regenerative power of behaving badly, being disrespectful toward condescending assholes. In his self-interview, in which he pretended to be discoursing with Santa Claus, he said, “I was at the New York Film Critics Circle Awards one year. They called me up when somebody canceled two days before the thing, and asked me to present some awards. So I went, and one of the funniest film moments I’ve ever had was when they introduced the New York film critics. They all stood up; ‘motley’ isn’t the word for that group. Everybody had some sort of vision problem, some sort of damage. I had to bury myself in my napkin. As they kept going, it just got funnier and funnier looking. By the time they were all up, it was like, ‘You have been selected as the people who have been poisoned; you were the unfortunate people who were not in the control group that didn’t receive the medication.’” This is a little amazing, even shocking to me; I fancy myself something of a literary troublemaker, but I can’t imagine being quite this publicly dismissive toward the powers-that-be in the book world (privately, of course, I’m acid itself—what bravery). I suppose his career is less dependent than mine is upon good reviews, i.e., he’s actually popular; still, he has what Hemingway said was the “most essential gift for a good writer: a built-in, shock-proof shit detector.”

Hemingway’s hometown of Oak Park is about twenty miles southwest of Murray’s hometown of Wilmette; both men have or had a gimlet-eyed view of the disguises the world wears. It’s more broadly midwestern, though, than only Hemingwayesque, I think. Dave Eggers, who grew up in Lake Forest, has it. Johnny Carson, who was raised in Nebraska, and David Letterman, who was raised in Indiana, also have it—this quality of detachment, which is a way of not getting sucked in by all the shit sent your way, of holding on to some tiny piece of yourself which is immune to publicity, of wearing indifference as a mask. I strive for the same mystery in my own persona but fail miserably, since it’s so evident how much neediness trumps coolness.

Murray is, in other words, ironic. He’s alert to and mortified by the distance between how things appear to be and how they are. In Michael Jordan to the Max, a grotesquely worshipful IMAX film-paean, Murray, as a fan in the stands, says, “It’s like out of all the fifty thousand top athletes since, you know, prehistoric times—brontosaurus and pterodactyls included—he [Jordan]’s right there.” This is a modest example, but it betrays Murray’s impulse: to unhype the hype, to replace force-fed feeling with something less triumphal, more plausible and human and humble. In Stripes, Murray delivers a rousing speech to his fellow soldiers to encourage them to learn overnight what they haven’t learned during all of boot camp—how to march. “We’re Americans,” he says, “we’re all dogfaces, but we have within us something American that knows how to do this.” Murray saves the speech from sentimentality by mocking the sentimentality. I’m not really in this situation, Murray’s character seems to be thinking; I’m not really in this movie, Murray seems to be thinking. That reminds us, or at least me, of our own detachment and puts us in the scene, thereby making the moment credible and, ironically, moving. Here, as in so many other Murray movies, he somehow manages to install a level or two of Plexiglas between himself and the rest of the movie. At its most dire, Murray’s persona is simply anti-feeling; at its most fierce it’s anti-faux-feeling. This is what gives his persona such an edge: it’s unclear whether his self-mockery is saving grace or Nowhere Man melancholia. It’s both, obviously, to which I can attest or hope to attest. Maybe detachment is a way to get to real feeling; maybe it’s a dead end from which no feeling arises.

Murray’s characteristic manner of delivering dialogue is to add invisible, ironic quotes around nearly every word he says, as if he weren’t quite convinced he should go along with the program that is the script, as if he were just trying out the dialogue on himself first rather than really saying it to someone else in a movie that millions of people are going to see, as if he were still seeing how it sounds. The effect is to undermine every assertion at the moment it’s asserted. As a stutterer and writer, I’m a sucker for Murray’s push-pull relationship to language; it’s undoubtedly one of the main sources of the deep psychic identification I’ve always felt toward him. In Tootsie, as Dustin Hoffman’s roommate who’s a playwright/waiter, Murray says about his work-in-progress, “I think it’s going to change theatre as we know it.” Murray says the line in a way that no one else could, simultaneously embodying and emptying out cliché. We’re aware that he’s full of shit, but we’re also aware that he’s aware he’s full of shit. For which we adore him, because he reminds us how full of shit we are every hour of every day. He’s also a welcome relief from Dustin Hoffman’s earnestness.

His pet technique for underlining his self-consciousness is knocking, loudly, on the fourth wall. Serving as guest broadcaster for a Chicago Cubs baseball game, which Murray once said is the single best performance of his life, he answered the phone in the adjoining booth, stuck out his tongue at the camera, called down to the players on the field. At pro-am tournaments, Murray wears goofy outfits, jokes with the crowd, hits wacky shots—in an effort to tear a hole in the sanctimonious veil surrounding the game of golf. At a Carnegie Hall benefit concert with a Sinatra theme, Murray, backed by a full orchestra, sang “My Way”; Murray told an interviewer, “I basically rewrote the lyrics and changed them around to suit my own mood. I started getting laughs with it, and then I was off the click track. I mean, there’s a full orchestra playing to its own charts, so they just keep playing, you know. And the fact I’m off the lyric and talking and doing things—it doesn’t matter to them. They don’t keep vamping; it’s not like a piano bar. They just keep going to the end. So I said let’s see if this big band is going to stay with me here, and they didn’t. They just kept barreling right ahead. But I managed to catch them at the pass. I headed them off at the pass and turned it around and got out of it again.” It’s crucial to Murray’s comedy that the orchestra is there, playing away, serious as society—the formal straitjacket he wriggles out of.

By far my favorite joke I’ve heard recently goes:

Knock-knock.

Who’s there?

Interrupting Cow.

Interrupt—

Moo.

Murray and I—other people, too, obviously—share an impulse to simultaneously annihilate and resuscitate received forms. I have an extraordinarily vivid memory of a very brief video clip I saw twenty years ago of a juggler who was riding a unicycle and pretending to have great difficulty controlling the knives he was juggling. He was in absolute control, of course, but I loved how much trouble he pretended to be having; I loved how afraid he pretended to be; I loved how much it was both a parody of the form and a supreme demonstration of the form. I loved it so much (an artist pretending death was going to win, but art had it under control all along, thank you very much) it brought me to tears.

Murray’s acute self-consciousness is paralyzing, but also curiously freeing: it frees him up to be a rebel (just barely). In Razor’s Edge, he’s the only character who is both (just) sane and (beautifully) whimsical, which is the balance he strikes in nearly every movie, his signature mixture of hip and square. He knows better than anyone else that you don’t always have to do what they tell you to do, but he also tends to realize that the way out of the slough of despond is delight in other people, making him clubbable. In Stripes, asked by the drill sergeant what he’s doing, Murray’s character says, “Marching in a straight line, sir.” It’s not a straight line, but what he’s doing is still, finally, marching. Although Murray is utterly insubordinate toward the sergeant, he winds up earning the sergeant’s admiration by leading a rescue mission at the end. Murray is a goof-off and anti-establishment, but he winds up having the right stuff. He gets it together but on his own terms, if “own terms” can be defined unambitiously.

One of the many good jokes of Tootsie is that Murray, playing an avant-garde playwright, is nobody’s idea of an avant-garde playwright: everything in his body—his competence, his responsibility—screams acceptance of things as they are. He defies without sabotaging authority. When an interviewer asked Murray whether Rushmore director Wes Anderson’s gentle approach toward actors was effective, Murray replied, a bit huffily, “Well, that’s good manners, you know? That’s tact.” Murray went to Loyola Academy, a prep school, in Wilmette, and all his hell-raising is in a way the unthreateningly bad behavior of a slumming preppy. The ultimate effect of all his hijinks on the links is to deepen golf’s hushed, moneyed silence (Murray’s antics would seem redundant at a football game). There’s the official way and then there’s your own way; Murray does it his own way, he never gets co-opted, but—and this is his magic trick, this is the movies, this is what is so deeply reassuring about his persona—he still succeeds (leads the rescue mission, rids the city of ghosts). He therefore is a perfect bridge figure between, to paint in broad strokes, fifties conformity, sixties rage, seventies zaniness, eighties and nineties capitalismo; hence his appeal—he convinces us that we’re still a little rebellious inside even as we’re finally doing what everyone else is doing. As the child of left-wing activists, I’m frequently embarrassed by how bourgeois my yearnings are; Murray’s relatively unangry versions of épater le bourgeois coat my conformity in glee.

This very deep contradiction in Murray is directly related to the way corrosive irony, in him, sits atop deep sentimentality. (So, too, for myself: walking out of the theatre after Terms of Endearment, I subjected it to a withering critique while tears were still streaking down my face.) When he was guest commentator at the Cubs game, he mocked every player on the opposing team in a parody of fan fanaticism (“That guy shouldn’t even be in the major leagues, and he knows it. He’s lying to himself; he really should go back into some sort of community service in his hometown”), but he refused every opportunity the cameraman handed him to score easy points off the enormously fat African-American umpire Eric Gregg, whose uniform had been lost and who just couldn’t get comfortable in his borrowed clothes. Before the Cubs played their first night game at Wrigley Field, Murray visited the booth again, this time for just a few minutes, mercilessly ribbing the legendary announcer Harry Caray before suddenly declaring, “This is the most beautiful park in the world.”

I feel so earthbound compared to Murray, so uncelebratory. Asked about his parodies of bad singers, Murray explained, “You have to see what the original center of the song was and how they destroyed it. It’s the ruining of a good song that you want to re-create. You have to like the stuff and you have to, I guess, know that when you have the microphone you have the opportunity to touch somebody. And when you don’t do it with the lyric of it, and your own excuse for technique comes in and steps on top of it, that’s, I guess, what I object to when I’m mimicking something.” That old story: rage is disappointed romanticism.

Disappointed romanticism, however, isn’t romanticism. Murray isn’t Tom Hanks; he never, or almost never, does romantic comedy. He likes himself too much, for as Murray says, “The romantic figure has to behave romantically even after acting like a total swine. It’s, ‘I’m so gorgeous you’re going to have to go through all kinds of hell for me,’ and that isn’t interesting to me. Romance is very particular. There’s something about romance, that if you don’t have to have someone, you’re more desirable.” Murray has the dignity of not having to have someone, or at least not going on and on about it.

He is, in short, male, a guy’s guy, still extremely boyish though he was born in 1950, broad-shouldered, six feet three, upbeat about his masculinity in a way that seems quite foreign and enviable to me. My voice is high and soft, as a way to control my stutter, but also as if in apology for my Y chromosome. His father, who died when Murray was nineteen, was a lumber salesman. One of five brothers (and nine siblings), Murray now has five sons (and no daughters) from two marriages. So much of his persona, his shtick, his appeal is that he revels in and excels at the brutal but obviously affectionate teasing that is characteristic of large families, whereas more than one person has asked me, apropos of nothing in particular, whether I’m an only child (I’m not).

Occasionally psychotic but never neurotic, Murray plays well against nervous types, as I’m trying to make him do in this essay. He’s not me. He’s not Woody Allen. He’s not Dustin Hoffman. In Tootsie, in which Dustin Hoffman plays an obnoxious actor, Michael Dorsey, who pretends to be a woman in order to get a part in a soap and, by “becoming” a woman, learns to be a better man, Murray is the true north of “normal” masculinity, our ordinary-guy guide, the big galoot around whom the gender-bending bends. “I think we’re getting into a weird area,” he informs Hoffman when Hoffman gets preoccupied with his female alter ego’s wardrobe. “Instead of trying to be Michael Dorsey the great actor or Michael Dorsey the great waiter,” he advises Hoffman before ushering him into his surprise birthday party, “why don’t you just try to be Michael Dorsey?” Murray’s the king of hanging out. He already knows how to be himself and how to be kind, how to be male but not be a jerk, whereas Hoffman needs to learn how to do this. Hoffman, the high-strung Jew, must learn how to do what Murray already does instinctively—to like life, to like the opposite sex, to embrace his own anima. Live, live, live, as Strether, that priss, finally realizes in Henry James’s The Ambassadors, and as Murray has always known, as Murray always conveys.

Murray’s boyishness is, at its most beguiling, childlikeness: openness to surprise. In Cinderella Story: My Life in Golf, Murray writes, “The sum and substance of what I was hoping to express is this. In golf, just as in life—I hoped I could get that line in the book somewhere [Murray’s relentless ironic gaze, his ear for cliché]—the best wagers are laid on oneself.” In The Man Who Knew Too Little, Murray plays Wallace Ritchie, a dim American man who, visiting his businessman-brother in London, thinks he’s attending an avant-garde “Theatre of Life” performance and unbeknownst to him is caught up in an international spy-versus-spy scheme. Murray, as Ritchie, wins the day—defeats the bad guys, gets the girl—because he just goes with the flow, is cool and relaxed, never stops believing that he’s watching and participating in an unusually realistic performance. Ritchie’s relaxedness is Murray’s relaxedness, Ritchie’s distance is Murray’s: life is theatre with arbitrary rules. His bemused bafflement toward everything that happens is a handbook for Murray’s acting technique and his approach to life—the absurdity of all action, but (and therefore) grooving in the moment.

When Murray was the guest commentator at the Cubs game, he somehow made anything the camera focused on—a hot-dog wrapper, an untucked shirt—seem newly resonant, of possible interest, because unlike every person to ever broadcast a baseball game, Murray talked about what was actually going on in his head, was actually seeing what was going on in front of his eyes rather than viewing it through a formulaic filter, was taking in the entire ballpark rather than just the sporting event per se. His eyes haven’t gone dead yet. Life, seen through such eyes, becomes existentially vivid. Broadcasting this game, Murray seemed as interested in the physical universe as a beagle, sniffing the ballpark for new sensory input. The only solution to the soul is the senses. He’s a combination of two characters from the movie American Beauty: the kid with the video camera who can see ribbons of beauty in a plastic bag being blown around in the wind, and the Kevin Spacey character, who processes everything through his sulphur-spewing irony machine. I’m Spacey and want to be the kid with the video camera.

It’s Murray’s attempt to be authentic, and underlining of his attempt to be authentic, that I admire most; all of my current aesthetic excitements derive from my boredom with the conventions of fiction and my hope that nonfiction (autobiography, confession, memoir, embarrassment, whatever) can perhaps produce something that is for me “truer,” more “real.” The tape I have of Murray broadcasting the Cubs game has live audio rather than commercial breaks between innings; Murray sounds exactly the same off air as he does on. He’s incapable of doing Stentorian Announcer let alone Star Turn. I adore this about him. At one point in his life he was strongly influenced by the philosophy of Gurdjieff, whose Madame Blavatskyesque work I can’t bring myself to read but one of whose titles is Life Is Only Real, Then, When “I Am.” A bad translation, to be sure, but the self-conscious quote marks around “I Am,” the slight or not so slight inscrutability, the deep yearning to apprehend and embody reality—that’s Murray’s program.

The royal road to the authentic for Murray is through the primitive. People who pretend that they are truly civilized Murray finds ridiculous. In Caddyshack, a movie about class warfare phrased as a golf comedy, he plays a groundskeeper who is obsessed with killing gophers. Chevy Chase is the embodiment of the golfing fop—moneyed, charming, handsome. Murray is riddled by doubt, self-pitying, working-class (“I got a blue-collar chip on my shoulder,” Murray said. “That part of it was not hard”). Chase, for all his bonhomie, isn’t in touch with the primitive force of the universe; Murray is (he’s the only one capable of recognizing that a dark brown clump floating in the country-club swimming pool isn’t a turd but a Baby Ruth bar, which he eats). The movie teaches the young golfer-protagonist that Chase is wrong, Murray is right. The only way for Young Golfer to grow up is by learning how to say fuck you to the “snobatorium”—the country club’s version of golf and life.

Would that rebellion were so easy. Still, when the interviewer Charlie Rose advised Bill Murray to take a sabbatical, because lawyers do, Murray said, “If law firms do it, Charlie, it probably can’t be right.” (That “probably” is quintessential Murray—anti-establishmentarian but not utterly.) Rose also advised him about the importance of “proportionality” in one’s life—balance between work and play. “I want to learn that one, too,” Murray said, pretending to search for a pencil. “Let me write it down.” In Wild Things, Murray is the lone actor among several other middle-aged actors in the movie who is granted the privilege of grasping the movie’s vision: human beings are beasts, life is a scam, manipulate the other beasts in the jungle to your own advantage. It would be impossible to cast Murray as someone who didn’t understand this.

Maybe it’s not much of a revelation to anyone else, but to me it always seems to be: we’re finally just physical creatures living in the physical world. Murray knows this in the bottom of his bones. If Murray didn’t ad-lib the following lines in Tootsie, he should have: “I don’t want a full house at the Winter Garden Theatre. I want ninety people who just came out of the worst rainstorm in the city’s history. These are people who are alive on the planet, until they dry off. I wish I had a theatre that was only open when it rained.” All of Murray’s verbal play happens atop a foundation of understated physical grace. In Space Jam, Murray isn’t Michael Jordan, but it’s crucial that he isn’t Wayne Knight, either. He’s halfway between jock god and blubbery nerd—someone we can identify with. After kibitzing with Michael Jordan at the golfing tee, wearing madras shorts and cornball shirt and shoes, he finally whacks the hell out of the ball. So, too, at pro-am tournaments it wouldn’t work if, after goofing around for twenty minutes, he couldn’t finally play the game. By being both ridiculous and competent, he becomes beautifully contradictory—the unicycle-riding knife juggler who pretends to be anxiety-stricken but isn’t.

I imagine that Murray would be a bit of a bully in the way a hip older brother or popular camp counselor might be—making you feel bad if you just don’t want to have fun right now as Murray defines fun, not allowing you to just mope if that’s what you want to do. I imagine he would be a drill sergeant on this score—toward his sons, say—because a frenetically kept-up joie de vivre is how he’s managed to paper over his fairly real despair, and if he can, he’s going to bring everyone along with him out of hell. I admire this and resent it a little; why can’t we mope if we want to mope? Maybe the only solution to the soul isn’t the senses; maybe it’s deeper soul-searching (probably not); maybe there is no soul.

“To be, to be, sure beats the shit out of not to be,” he writes at the end of The Cinderella Story. At the very end of Where the Buffalo Roam, in which Murray plays Hunter Thompson, Murray quotes Lord Buckley’s epitaph: “He stomped on the terra.” This is the nucleus of Murray: we’re made of clay; we better cause a little ruckus while we can. He’s the anti-Malvolio in our midst; he’s Tigger versus the suits. Life is absurd—make it your own absurdity. Instead of wearing artiste basic-black—my dumb uniform—Murray typically wears his own weird mix of plaids and prints of different patterns and colors—a tartan vest, for instance, with a paisley tie, and a sky blue shirt. Or black pants, a brown striped shirt, and a tan vest. Nutty clothes—so out they’re in, cool because he’s wearing them. In What About Bob? Murray, as Bob Wiley, the patient of anhedonic psychiatrist Leo Marvin (Richard Dreyfuss, the un–Lee Marvin), visits the Marvins’ summerhouse and succeeds in making even dishwashing, for Chrissake, fun for Marvin’s family, though not for Dr. Marvin, of course. Murray and Dreyfuss reportedly came to despise each other in the making of the movie—Murray’s unscripted silliness drove Dreyfuss crazy, in exactly the same way Bob drives Leo mad in the movie—and I know we’re supposed to love Murray and hate Dreyfuss, and I do, I do, but I’m much closer to serious, striving Dr. Marvin than I am to antic Bob, which is, I suppose, what this essay is about: my distance from Murray, my yearning to be him, the gap between us, the way he makes life seem bearable (fun, amusing) if I could only get with his giddiness. (I can’t.) In Murray’s golf book, Cheryl Anderson, a golf pro, says, “I was practicing at the far end of the Grand Cypress range one morning. There wasn’t another soul there, just a set of clubs in one of the stands a few yards from me. Then a figure appeared in the distance. He was on a bicycle, at the same time carrying a boom box. It was Bill. He gave me a quick nod, then walked to the clubs, set down his box, and flipped on a tape. It was an out-there rock group called Big Head Todd and the Monsters. He hit balls to the music for a while, then picked up the box, nodded goodbye, and pedaled off.”

Physical grace as a container, then, for spiritual grace, if that’s not putting too fine a point on it. “A lot of Rushmore is about the struggle to retain civility and kindness in the face of extraordinary pain,” Murray said shortly after the film was released. “And I’ve felt a lot of that in my life.” This is what Murray knows so well and what I’ve been trying to learn from him: life is a shit-storm; laugh (somehow and barely). In his self-interview, he tells Santa a story about making Scrooged: “We’re shooting in this Victorian set for weeks, and [Buddy] Hackett is pissed all the time, angry that he’s not the center of attention, and finally we get to the scene where we’ve gotta shoot him at the window, saying, ‘Go get my boots,’ or whatever. The set is stocked with Victorian extras and little children in Oliver kind of outfits, and the director says, ‘All right, Bud, just give it whatever you want.’ And Hackett goes off on a rant. Unbelievably obscene. He’s talking—this is Hackett, not me—about the Virgin Mary, a limerick sort of thing, and all these children and families . . . the look of absolute horror. He’s going on and on and on, and finally he stops. It’s just total horror, and the camera’s still rolling. You can hear it, sort of a grinding noise. And the director says, ‘Anything else, Bud?’” Murray loves the director’s dignity against the shit-storm, his refusal to be cowed or fazed.

In an article in Film Comment, “The Passion of Bill Murray,” Greg Solman says about Murray’s performance in Mad Dog and Glory, “What’s remarkable about the performance is how well Murray can now convey the intrinsic humor of his characters and situations but differentiate them from others in his past by eliminating irony, sarcasm, and self-reflexivity.” This seems to me wrong. In the twenty-five years Murray’s been acting, he’s gotten better not by ever going away for a second from irony but by finding deeper and deeper levels of emotion within it. At the end of Scrooged, Murray, the scabrous president of a television network who recovers the Christmas spirit, walks onto the set of the cheesy, live Christmas special he’s produced, announcing: “It’s Christmas Eve. It’s the one night of the year where we all act a little nicer, we smile a little easier, we cheer a little more. For a couple of hours out of the whole year we are the people that we always hoped we would be. It’s a miracle, it’s really a sort of a miracle, because it happens every Christmas Eve. You’ll want it every day of your life, and it can happen to you. I believe in it now. I believe it’s going to happen to me now. I’m ready for it.” A few moments later, when he has trouble dragging his long lost beloved, Claire, in front of the camera, Murray, clearly improvising, says, “This is like boning a marlin.” It’s Murray’s fidelity to his own mordant consciousness and the locating of joy within that mordancy that is, to me, the miracle. This is getting a little overadulatory, so I’ll stop.

An unfortunate fact about stuttering is that it prevents you from ever entirely losing self-consciousness when expressing such traditional and truly important emotions as love, hate, joy, and deep pain. Always first aware not of the naked feeling itself but of the best way to phrase the feeling so as to avoid verbal repetition, you come to think of emotions as belonging to other people, being the world’s happy property and not yours—not really yours except by way of disingenuous circumlocution. Hence my iron grip on ironic distance; hence my adoration of Murray; hence my lifelong love of novels (The Great Gatsby, A Separate Peace, Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier, Günter Grass’s Cat and Mouse) in which a neurasthenic narrator contemplates his more vital second self; hence this essay. My first novel is about a sportswriter’s vicarious relationship with a college basketball player; my most recent book, a diary of an NBA season, is largely given over to my obsession with Gary Payton. What is it about such a relationship that speaks so strongly to me? Art calling out to Life, Un-Life wanting Life? Are these just parts of myself in eternal debate or am I really this anemic? Murray, for all his anomie, likes being in the world. Bully for him. I love standing in shadow, gazing intently at ethereal glare.

David Shields is the New York Times bestselling author of fifteen books, including The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead; Salinger (co-written by Shane Salerno); Reality Hunger, named one of the best books of 2010 by more than thirty publications; Black Planet, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Remote, winner of the PEN/Revson Award; and Dead Languages, winner of the PEN Syndicated Fiction Award. He lives with his wife and daughter in Seattle, where he is the Milliman Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at the University of Washington. His work has been translated into twenty languages.

What do you notice when you first enter a story? Who is talking? Who are they talking to? Where are they standing? What’s going on in the background? Is there a background?

There are two primary reasons why people read: boredom, which is my disease, and the need for reliable information, which is my constant motivation. I want to know everything. And I do, indeed, pick up books just to get the information that, in my upbringing, I missed. But I cannot tell you how many stories I pick up, and two people are having a conversation about their sex lives—which is a great place to begin, sex is always a good place to begin—but I don’t know who they are, and I don’t know where they are. It makes me crazy to step into a story and not know where I am. It makes me crazy when characters are arguing about sex, and I don’t know what sex means for them. The story seems to take place in no place.

Most Americans no longer have the history of growing up in a town where their parents grew up and their grandparents grew up and handed down stories about what came before. We no longer necessarily know the story of nobody goes down that road at night because the colonel killed a bunch of people out there and the ghosts walk the roads. Used to be that story was told for generations. No more. If you’re American, you’ve probably moved at least three times in the last decade. You probably do not live where you were born. Almost surely, you do not live close to your parents. Almost surely, you have to invent the place that you are writing -about.

And you’re jealous of people you think come from a place that is generally recognizable—Southerners, who all have porches and pickup trucks and grandmothers (never mind that bunches of Southerners come from Atlanta); Bostonians, who can remember that last great blizzard that shut down the city; people from the Chicago projects; Jews from Staten Island or Queens or the Lower East Side, who eat pickles and go to the Second Avenue Deli and also have a grandmother. Everybody knows these places and the people in these places are all assumed to share the same food and the same language. Their place is a given.

But if you’re from a place that no one knows, you have to invent it on the page.

I grew up among truck drivers and waitresses, and, for me, the place where most stories take place is the place that is no place for most other people. The truck stop: no place. The diner: no place. The grocery store: an empty landscape that you do not ascribe as being a real place. But for me those places are real places, with a population I recognize and can describe, a people I love even if they do not always love me.

I can give you detail. I can describe for you the tile they use in most truck stops because truckers have a horrible tendency to puke after having drunk great quantities of beer on top of chili. I know the colors of those tiles. I know, in fact, why 7-Elevens are designed the way they are. I’ve worked there. I recognize why diners are they way they are—why, in fact, I’ll make more money waiting on a booth than on the counter. Those places are real places for me. You probably read my stories to learn more about diners. And waitresses. And truck drivers. And I read to learn about the Jews in Brooklyn, the fishermen of Maine, and the combine drivers in Iowa. I’m lusting after those people I know little about: Bostonians who run along the Charles River in shorts even on snowy gray mornings, South Americans who live halfway up a hillside and speak Portuguese, Amish who somehow wound up in Hawaii and live out near Hilo and grow mangoes and passion fruit. All of these people are profoundly exotic to me, and I ache to know their secrets—especially their secret places.

Place is often something you don’t see because you’re so familiar with it that you devalue it or dismiss it or ignore it. But in fact it is the information your reader most wants to know.

When I went to college, I would sneak into other people’s dorms and look in their rooms. I wasn’t out to rob anyone but to learn about who they were and what they had. That, too, is place. All the stuff you’ve got that you don’t see is place—and me, I am your reader, and I want to know all about it. Your reader comes into your narrative to steal knowledge—who you are and what is all around you, what you use, or don’t use, what you need, or fear, or want—all that sweet reverberating detail. It is just like me going into those dorm rooms and taking a good solid look around. Your stuff provides telling details from which I can derive all kinds of information about you. I can imagine your self-consciousness, your prejudices, your need to be in control, and maybe even what you are willing to risk or share or not risk or not share. I am making you up in my mind, deriving you from clues you provide, you and your story.

So let’s review what place is.

Place is visual detail: manicured grass or scrubby weeds, broken concrete or pristine tarmac glistening with morning dew. Place is conditions: weather, atmosphere. Are the roads crowded or are they empty? When you step outside your house in the morning and you hit that clean, cool sidewalk, are there people walking around? Are they looking at you or are they looking away? Are you lonely? Are you nervous?

Place requires context. Is it responsive? Does it notice me? Or is it porcelain, pristine, and just ignoring my passage through? Are there people on the street who flinch when I smile at them? Is there a reason they do that? Place is where the “I” goes. Place is what that “I” looks at, what it doesn’t look at. Is it happy? Is it sad? Is it afraid? Is it curious?

What I am trying to say is that place is not just landscape—a list of flora and fauna and street names. That’s not place, that’s not even decent research. Which brings me to my other point.

I cannot abide a story told to me by a numb, empty voice that never responds to anything that’s happening, that doesn’t express some feelings in response to what it sees. Place is not just what your feet are crossing to get to somewhere. Place is feeling, and feeling is something a character expresses. More, it is something the writer puts on the page—articulates with deliberate purpose. If you keep giving me these eyes that note all the details—if you tell me the lawn is manicured but you don’t tell me that it makes your character both deeply happy and slightly anxious—then I’m a little bit frustrated with you. I want a story that’ll pull me in. I want a story that makes me drunk. I want a story that feeds me glory. And most of all, I want a story I can trust. I want a story that is happening in a real place, which means a place that has meaning and that evokes emotions in the person who’s telling me the story. Place is emotion.

So I’m going to say some unscrupulous, terrible, horrible things that are absolutely true in my mind, if not in yours:

Central Florida is despair.

New York City is sex.

California is smug.

Boston has never gotten over Henry James.

Seattle and Portland lie about their weather.

Iowa City is one hotel room and a chlorine stink away from the suburbs of hell.

I keep a list. I keep track of the places I have been and what I have decided about those places from stories I have experienced or read or heard or dreamed. It’s a writer’s game, but also a game for anyone who grew up with a sense of not knowing much and trying to figure out what everyone else knows or thinks they know.

Now I’ll tell you the place I don’t want.

A motel in Iowa City whose windows open onto the swimming pool. Have you been there? Not a Motel 6 or a Days Inn. Probably a Sheraton, maybe the Hyatt, but more likely the Marriott, and definitely not the Four Seasons.

For a year I took a picture of every motel room I stayed in. I lined them up. The only thing different as the year went on was that I was more and more often in rooms with minibars. And you could tell it was a minibar. That was the only difference I could see. The bed is always the bed. There is always a TV; there is always a remote control. Sometimes there are extra pillows. Sometimes there aren’t.

It’s nowhere. It’s no place. And there you are.

If you’re lucky, Oprah is on at eleven thirty at night. And you can check out what she’s done lately. Try, try, try not to start channel-hopping and watching the ads. You can’t afford any of that stuff anyway. It’s the middle of the night, three o’clock in the morning, and you’re in a room in which the art on the wall is a stylized painting of a flower or an unknown landscape. And I do mean an unknown landscape. Someone is doing these paintings and making money, but it’s not an actual artist and that landscape is nowhere you recognize. Also, the mattress is kind of soggy, and you’ve got one of those covers that you are too hot if you have it on you and too cold if you pull it off. You’re awake at three o’clock in the morning and you are nowhere; this is not a place.

Hyatts, Sheratons—that’s where all those stories take place in which there is no landscape, in which there is not the mention of a tree or the grass or the weather. There is no weather in a Hyatt. Stories that take place in no place—why would you leave out the thing that will most bring alive what you’re trying to do? You think the most important thing is that confident voice of that “I” narrator who, let’s be clear, is really you when you were twenty-two, and they didn’t treat you right, didn’t fuck you right, didn’t love you right—Momma, first lover, Daddy, I don’t care who it was. But I want the story to burn me. I want the page to crisp my fingers.

You were in that room with him when he said no, he did not want you, and you walked out of the room and it felt as if you were bleeding into your own belly. You went down the stairs, out into the night, and you smelled—what did you smell? Was there the distinct odor of spilled beer on the steps? Were you thinking about how when your daddy left that was all that you could smell on the front steps after he was gone? Is it torn-up weeds that you smell? Somebody was sitting on those steps earlier and she was crying, and she didn’t have anything else so she reached down and pulled up the grass and ripped it, and you can smell the torn grass in the air.

Or is it your own skin? You had put on perfume. You had bathed carefully. You had washed your hair. You had used that new soap with lavender scent and flowers. You wanted to be wanted, and no one can ever understand how terrible it felt to be told, no, I don’t want you. But you smell your skin, and it stinks of sour disappointment, and you don’t want you. You can understand why he didn’t want to have sex with you. That’s place—the smell in the air, the memory, the association. It’s all history. You are somebody real who comes from somewhere, and you have been hurt in specific, deep, terrible ways.

Or, it could be that other story.

You have been cared for and loved and made joyful. You expect good things. You expect love. Take a deep breath and what do you smell? Mmmm. You’ve opened your suitcase and your mother, or your girlfriend, or—oh, my God—your husband of one year who still gets tears in his eyes when you reach for him has tucked something inside. You open up the suitcase and lying there, wrapped in plastic, carefully prepared, is a sugar cookie with anisette. The smell is enough to make your whole body flush with lust. You open it up and breathe it in; you won’t eat it now. You think about it. Your mother or your lover or your husband or your best friend sneaked that in there for you to find. You are a person to whom wonderful things happen. And tonight, tonight, when you come back to the Hyatt, more wonderful things will happen. The manager will have left chocolates and a bottle of some perfect complimentary wine, with a glass sitting by it waiting for you, or maybe there will be strawberries dipped in chocolate. You are a person to whom wonderful things happen.

That’s place, a place more of us should get to more often.

Place is people.

Place is people with self-consciousness.

Place is people with desire.

My major reason for reading stories is that I get off on knowing other people’s secrets. On every level, I get off—I tremble from the power of the sexual charge of the secret and the electrical excitement of suddenly discovering the connections I never made before. I want to know everything and so I need an actual person walking the landscape, responding to it, telling me, in fact, how he or she wound up there. What was the decision-making process? Who is that person in this place? I need to know the person walking the landscape, seeing the landscape, remembering another landscape, putting that landscape on top of this landscape. Then suddenly I’m not in one place, I’m in two places. And there’s a narrator, and the narrator is making language choices, and that’s a landscape. It’s a landscape on the page.

Story is negotiated. Story happens from what we put on the page and what the reader takes off the page. The reader does not always take off the page what we imagine we have put there. Because, as I said, there’s a whole bunch of stuff you don’t even see anymore. And you don’t know who your reader might be. When I read your story, I read it with my imagination and my landscape, my sense of place. I can see the place you tell me only through the filter of the places I can imagine, unless you’re really good. And it’s not going to be good enough just to tell me that a place is all red brick and that kind of off-white limestone. That’s not sufficient. I grew up in Greenville, South Carolina, with clapboard houses. No bricks. What I have is the landscape in which I grew up and the landscapes that I have adapted from every damned book I’ve ever read, and every damned book I’ve ever read is in the back of my head while I’m reading yours. Every place every other writer has taken me is in me.

Can you take me somewhere no one else has?

Can you show me a place I don’t already have a reference for?

Place is the desire for a door. Place is the desire to get out of where you are. Place is experiencing where you are as a trap. Are you in hell on your way to heaven? Are you momentarily safe in heaven, fearful of falling into hell? Characters that interest me, about whom I am most curious, are always engaged in a journey.

Fear is a wonderful place for writers. A character who is genuinely terrified is in the best place because the reader is going to be terrified as well. The reader is going to be sweaty, anxious, wanting something to happen, turning pages. It’s a better place if there are loud noises about which a character is not entirely sure of the cause. Fearful places. The lights have gone out, and the rain’s coming down so hard, and loud, she can’t hear anything, and it’s dark and somebody might be chasing her and she’s running and the floor is slippery. The tiles are slippery, they’re old and they’re worn and she’s barefoot and sweaty and sliding, and she thinks she can hear somebody coming behind her. She can hear his boots. She can smell his sweat. He’s close enough that she can smell him. He’s real. Oh God! He’s so damn close! And you know what? You know what?

It’s better if the fear is real.

You’re sitting at home. You’re reading this essay. The lights aren’t going to go off; it’s not raining. There’s nothing to be afraid of. Probably not, anyway. Unless, wait. It’s not just anybody running up the hall; it’s you—not second-person you, first-person YOU. I’m describing you; I’m in your body. Now, how do I make you know this? How do I make you know you’re running up the hall, and you’re terrified, and sweat’s pouring off you, and you’re sliding on the slippery linoleum, and the person behind you with a knife is somebody you have reason to be afraid of?

I’m going to use specific details. I’m going to put you in Portland, Oregon. It’s July. It’s the last night of a writing conference. Everybody was drinking heavy. The students were all exchanging addresses and phone numbers. And you, you wouldn’t give this one guy your phone number. You were feeling really full of yourself because your workshop teacher liked that story you showed her and she said she wanted to read the rest of it and you could send it to her, and you were just feeling so good, and good stuff happens to you, it always does. And you go back to the dorm later than you’d planned, but there’s nobody else in the dorm. Listen. It’s raining. And the back door slams and there he is. And you didn’t give him your phone number, and he’s like, “Who the fuck do you think you are?” He’s coming up the hall and you’re barefoot and you’re sweating and you’re running and the lights go out and it’s raining hard. And just before the lights go out, you see what he has in his hand: he’s going to gut you from front to back. Run hard, run fast. It’s a specific place. It is your specific tender body that your momma loves so much. That’s place.

Dorothy Allison is the bestselling author of several novels including Bastard Out of Carolina, Cavedweller, and Two Or Three Things I Know For Sure. The recipient of numerous awards, she has been the subject of many profiles and a short documentary film of her life, Two or Three Things but Nothing For Sure.

As we will be at writing camp all week, we’ve decided to send little rays of craft sunshine to those of you couldn’t make it out to Portland for the Reed College dessert bar our annual Summer Writer’s Workshop.

Salinger and Sobs

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In the days immediately after my brother killed himself I’d go into the backyard and lie on our picnic table and watch the November wind bend the branches of a tall fir tree across the street. Really hard gusts would shake loose a raucous band of black crows and send them wheeling into the sky. They’d caw and cackle and circle and resettle and rise again, crowing, I guess, a noisy mocking counterpart to the flock of strangers in funerary black who’d shown up to bury my brother. About a week after Danny’d put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger and a couple days after his lame orthodox funeral at our childhood church, I went for a walk along a street of patched potholes that runs around Lake Union (near where, a year or so into the future, a future I was sure had ended tragically the night Danny shot himself, my other brother Mike would pull a similar stunt, jumping off the Aurora Bridge and living to tell about it, thus revealing to me the comic, the vaudevillian underside of suicide), and saw a scavenging crow jabbing its beak into the breast of an injured robin. The robin had probably first been hit by a car. It was flipped on its back and badly maimed, but it wasn’t carrion quite yet. One wing was pinned to its breast and the other flapped furiously in a useless struggle for flight and thus the bird, still fiercely instinctive, only managed to spin around in circles like the arrow you flick with your finger in a game of chance. The robin was fully alive, but it was caught in a futile hope, and I knew this, and the crow knew this, and while the crow taunted the bird, hopping down from its perch on a nearby fence, pecking at the robin, returning to his roost, waiting, dropping down and attacking again, I stood off to the side of the road and watched.

I’ll tell you the ultimate outcome of this lopsided contest a little later, but for now I bring it up only because, some years ahead, fully inhabiting my aborted future, I often ask myself a koanlike question re. my brother that goes something like this: if I could intervene and change my own particular history would I alter past events in such a way that I’d bring Danny back to life? Would I return the single rimfire bullet to its quiet chamber in the gun and let the night of November 26, 19__, pass away in sleep and dreams or drink or television or whatever the anonymous bulk of history holds for most people? Would I uncurl the fingers from the grip, would I take away the pain, would I unwrite the note and slip the blank sheet back in the ream and return the ream to pulp and etc., would I exchange my own monstrous father for some kindly sap out of the sitcom tradition, would I do any of this, would I? And where would I be? Would I be there, in the room? Would my role be heroic? And where exactly would I begin digging into the past, making corrections, amending it? How far back do I have to go to undo the whole dark kit and caboodle? I mean from where I sit now I can imagine a vast sordid history finally reaching its penultimate unraveled state in the Garden, under the shade of the tree of knowledge, begging the question of whether or not I’d halt the innocent hand, leaving the apple alone, unbitten.

I’m a little wary of prelapsarian schemes in much the same way I’m leery of conspiracy theories, both of which only seem to describe the limitations, like Hamlet’s nutshell, of the holder’s mind. You don’t really want to crash down the whole universe just to satisfy your situational unease or your incapacity to see the whole picture, do you? You don’t want a life based on your failure to understand life, right? If I were able to undo Danny’s death would that mean, too, that Mike’s suicide attempt would never occur, or would it simply mean that he’d find an alternate, more surefire lethality than leaping over the rail of Seattle’s most famous suicide spot, a spot that’s worked just hunky-dory for hundreds of others? Or would my remaining brother drown or die of internal injuries instead of, as it turned out, smacking the water, breaking his pelvis, destroying his bladder, dislocating his shoulder and yet, that screwed up (plus I forgot to mention his chronic schizophrenia), still having the presence of mind to kick off his boots, swim for shore, pull a quarter out of his pants, and call an ambulance for himself, easy as a man catching a cab? Would that little miracle not happen in this revamped history of mine? Would I just be trading one brother for another? Would I even be writing this, or would a lovely silence reign over my uneventful life, leaving me free to consider other, happier fortunes?

—

I’d never read J. D. Salinger or John Knowles, both staples of the high-school curriculum, because somehow out of the always ripening ambient culture I’d picked up a whiff of the East Coast, of the uppercrust and hoity-toity and, ipso facto, at least for me, a kind of irrelevance, irrelevance tinged with a defensive countersnobbery that’s so characteristic of the West. I couldn’t identify with the prep-school scene. I thought it was socially atavistic, some stupid idea invented in England. So instead of the boarding-school experiences of Salinger or Knowles I read Joyce’s Portrait oƒ the Artist as a Young Man strictly for its creepy Jesuit milieu and the way Stephen Dedalus used difference and snobbery to escape. The reading of Portrait was itself a Dedalean act of snobbery on my part, a pose I hoped would piss off the jocks at my Jesuit boys’ school. Why? Because I was a jock, but had recently quit all sports in order to take up managing my misery full-time. At that age, at sixteen, seventeen, I read fiction because I needed advice on how to live, and I needed it to be totally free of judgment. I wanted to see how other people did life. I had exiled myself from the kind of order found on the athletic field, and the alternatives that presented themselves most obviously at my school were to become a dope fiend or a scholar. I tried both and bookishness stuck. By reading I hoped to get as far as I could from Catholic homiletics, and quickly discovered that the best place for moral-free advice was really good fiction. Immediately I saw that stories looked squarely and bravely at lives without criticizing or condemning them. Admittedly, wanting practical advice is a pretty primitive idea of what a book should do, but that’s the sort of literary sense I had, treating novels and stories like the self-help manuals that cycle through the decades, reinventing relevance. I didn’t know any better, and probably still don’t. Anyway, I came late to The Catcher in the Rye, as an adult, and thought I’d be somewhat cold to its charms.

I wasn’t. Right from the beginning my reading of Salinger’s work was lopsided, eccentric, obsessed with the reclusive writer’s legendary silence and the theme of suicide that seems to stitch a quilt out of the extant work. As is always, perhaps inevitably, the case, the unbalanced weight my own life brought to the material gave the work this off-center, wobbly orbit, and even now I can’t seem to read the stuff any differently. It’s all about Suicide and Silence. Suicide is first mentioned when Holden, standing on a hill above the football field, says the game with Saxon Hall “was the last game of the year, and you were supposed to commit suicide or something if old Pencey didn’t win.” Other direct mentions of suicide or thinly veiled threats run through the story. The very word has a casual suggestive presence in Holden’s vocabulary. He volunteers to ride on top of the next atomic bomb. And then there’s the story he tells of James Castle, the boy who leaps from the window, killing himself, while wearing a black turtleneck he’d borrowed from Holden. It’s now generally a given in the literature of suicidology that every attempt is ambivalent, that some degree of chance is worked into each plan, a savior chosen, an opportunity for rescue extended, a tortured hope hidden near the heart of the suicide’s rapidly constricting universe. For instance, suicides tend to move toward society—and possible intervention—the closer they come to making and carrying out concrete plans. And of course The Catcher in the Rye takes its title from precisely this sort of ambivalence, and the story itself, in some ways an extended riff on saving and being saved, is otherwise full of specific strategies for rescue—with Holden nervously alternating point of view, vacillating between rescuer and rescued.

The passage below gives the book its name and is obviously as much about Holden’s hope for himself as it is about the fantasy of saving others:

I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody’s around—nobody big, I mean—except me. And I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff—I mean if they’re running and they don’t look where they’re going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That’s all I’d do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye . . .

I generally don’t read biographical gossip about writers, and don’t know a thing, not one scrap, about Salinger’s life (other than the silence), but the theme of suicide feels authentic to me, and so does his recurrent big family thing, two elements I share with—who? Salinger, or his various narrators, or both? I don’t know. Like the Glasses (let’s say), we too had seven kids, and one thing that seems to happen in large families more often than in small is that nicknames flourish, partly because there’s always some little kid around who can’t pronounce the real names of his older siblings. Little kids forming their first syllables corrupt those names, and the corruptions stick because they’re cute or funny or whatever. Salinger’s Glass family seems to be all nicknames except for Seymour. As the oldest child, I too was somewhat exempt—more namer than named—but a good example of the process from our family would be my sister Patricia, who quickly migrated from Tricia to Trish and then skipped sideways to Didya before finally arriving at Did. And Did’s sisters were Mugs, Gith, and Bean, and Did called my brother Danny Mr. Sobs, or plain Sobs, because when they played house he was always the baby. These goofed-up, singsong names recall Franny, Zooey, Boo Boo, etc. And too, in large families, children form their own fairly populous society, separate from the parents, and the nicknames become a kind of argot, a secret language, whereas in small families, I imagine, there’s more of an emphasis on vertical and direct contact with the adults. Anyway, Salinger’s use of nicknames, the proliferation of them, and the fact that the oldest, Seymour, doesn’t have one, has always been for me an important detail in understanding the work.

In Salinger’s work, there is an ongoing failure of the various narrators that occupy center stage, a failure to find a separate and distinct identity outside the corporate idea of family. Holden is a little bit D.B. and Allie and Phoebe, and Buddy is Seymour and Zooey, etc., etc. People from big families tend to have this intense group identity. I don’t know why, even though, for instance, I fall easily into the first-person plural when asked about my past. My gut instinct, looking back, is to use “we.” Is it size alone that accounts for the blurring of identity in a big family? The fact that you grow up crowded into the same bathroom, brushing your teeth in front of a mirror that has three or four other foamy white grins reflecting back at you, is that it? Or the way you end up wearing some other kid’s clothes, or finding a favorite outfit, years after you last wore it, in your brother’s drawer, as if he were just another, later edition of you—is that it? Possibly. Privacy, too, is a problem. You rarely get time alone. And with so many competing parties, a constantly negotiated peace accord is necessary if you hope to get along; and for the simplest things, for using a car on Friday night or choosing a channel on the television, you end up working closely, and in concert, with the other kids. In our house, taking this closeness a step further, we institutionalized the buddy system, a permanent arrangement in which every older kid was assigned a younger, and you were strictly accountable for that child’s safety at crosswalks as well as his mischief in the aisles of supermarkets and his happiness during the long wait to buy new play-shoes at Penny’s. As the oldest, my assigned buddy was my brother Danny, the youngest and rowdiest.

For Salinger’s narrators, there’s never sufficient separation from the family, at least that sense of family defined horizontally by siblings. Holden really only loves D.B., his dead brother Allie, and his sister Phoebe, mistrusting everyone else. Nobody outside the circle of family seems to make any sense to him, or at least they aren’t given the same ample room for oddity he grants his brothers and sisters. Other people simply aren’t real to Holden, not in the solid, reassuring way family is. My point here, in discussing identity and family, isn’t to draw near a psychological reading of the work. In fact, it seems to me that the decade of the fifties, which saw the first flush of a mass psychological processing of life, right away meets in Holden Caulfield its staunchest resistance. (In Seymour—An Introduction, Salinger writes of the psychiatric profession: “They’re a peerage of tin ears. With such faulty equipment, with those ears, how can anyone possibly trace the pain, by sound and quality alone, back to its source? With such wretched hearing equipment, the best, I think, that can be detected, and perhaps verified, is a few stray, thin overtones—hardly even counterpoint—coming from a troubled childhood or a disordered libido.”) There doesn’t seem to be anything really wrong with Holden, and yet everything is messed up. The conceit of the novel is that Holden’s telling the story from inside an institution, and you can imagine, you can hear in the loud nervous prose, that he’s making a direct appeal to the reader, going over the heads of doctors and nurses and various experts who don’t get it.

The subject of big families might seem fringy but it brings me to the organizing idea of authenticity. It’s a central question in all the work. What is real? What is trustworthy? Holden, of course, is famously on guard against phonies, watchful for insincere people or hypocrites, anyone giving a false impression, the pretentious, impostors and perverts. In “Bananafish” the trite phone conversation—the false narrative—between the wife and her mother is brutally wrong about Seymour. It’s untrue, it says nothing real or accurate about the world. And Buddy Glass, the narrator in Seymour—An Introduction, says, “I can usually tell whether a poet or prose writer is drawing from the first-, second-, or tenth-hand experience or is foisting off on us what he’d like to think is pure invention.” It’s not so much the content of this statement but the very issue of authenticity that piques my interest. The ability to detect authenticity is a critical faculty, something all of us develop, more or less. You can fail on either side, you can be gullible, easily duped, or you can be too skeptical, believing nothing. And with Holden, for example, it’s quite clear that something else, a voracious doubt, is driving him to question even the simplest interactions with people. Nothing is authentic for Holden, and his problem is not so much a superficial sorting of the true from the false—he can’t figure out how we come to know anything at all. That’s the noise, the frightening disturbance in the story, and it will only stop when Holden finds the authentic thing, the real (what?), or when he’s too exhausted to continue.

What can Holden rely on, what does he trust, what’s real for him? Holden’s response to life is like a body in shock, to withdraw into the core of identity, in his case the family, in order to keep the self functioning and alive. There’s a love and warmth and security to the way Salinger writes about family, a kind of bulwarked intimacy most readers respond to, that sits in contrast to the false, unfriendly, wolfish world huffing and puffing right outside the door. What I feel reading Salinger is an emotional power that comes from the writer’s ingrained assumption of the value and integrity of family, in particular the idea of family defined by siblings. Family is worthy of trust. The siblings in Salinger are fiercely loyal and extremely close to one another. So there’s that clear separation of family from everyone else, but something in-between is missing, some understanding—for the writer, and for Holden. Holden can’t negotiate the boundaries between himself and others—Antolini’s touch freaks him out—and can only imagine returning to his family as a refuge. But it’s my suspicion that that refuge isn’t really a haven the way Holden imagines it—nor is it safe for Salinger, who seems to defang his work by taking the parents out of almost every story. You wonder, where are the adults in this world that’s populated almost solely by precocious children?

This is guesswork, this is supposition: the real stress in Holden’s life comes from having no safe place, with his family offering him the least security of all. This remains unstated on purpose. In the injunctive first paragraph of The Catcher in the Rye, Holden says his parents would have “about two hemorrhages apiece” if he “told anything pretty personal about them. They’re quite touchy about anything like that, especially my father. They’re nice and all—I’m not saying that—but they’re also touchy as hell.” It’s that “touch,” rather than Antolini’s, that’s really got Holden running. It should be obvious by now that I don’t see The Catcher in the Rye as a coming-of-age story, especially not in the dismissive or pejorative sense; to me it’s no more about the anxious life of an average teenager than Huckleberry Finn is. The feelings Salinger’s trying to pinpoint don’t really have much to do with the fluctuating moods of a representative teen; adolescence isn’t the source of Holden’s outsized feelings. Possibly because I came to the book as an adult, for me it’s never been about the typical, but rather the
exceptional; it’s not meant to illustrate a phase of life we all pass through and share but instead to explore a disturbing and extreme loss of identity that leaves this one boy absolutely alone. And the depth of that loss comes from the fact that it’s not directly his, but his family’s. My guess is that in high school students learn that Holden doesn’t go home right away because he knows he’s going to be in big trouble. He’s been kicked out of school again. He’s failed and disappointed his parents once more, and his odyssey through New York is fueled by guilt and contrition. In my reading he doesn’t go home after leaving Pencey because home is the problem. His real expulsion is from the family, not school, and his sojourn through New York renders that loss in literal terms: we see the resulting anomie, the thoroughness of his horror. Two very different engines drive the respective readings. In one, he’s ultimately headed home, in the other he has nowhere to go, and never will.

Here’s the assumption behind my guesswork. Suicide is a kind of death that makes you doubt what you know about the deceased or what you can ever know about anybody. It strikes clear to the core of identity, reaching down into the heart of your life. Since my brother died I haven’t slept a single night alone with the lights off; I wake up afraid, and I have to know where I am, I need to see right away. And when I go out, I always leave a radio on, just so that when I come home I’ll hear voices or, more precisely, I won’t hear the silence and get all spooky imagining the surprises waiting for me. By a curious mechanism my brother’s death has extended the vivid fears of my childhood into my adult life. I find that I’m alert in ways that adults don’t need to be, and I’m ignorant of things grownups care most about. When a suicide happens within a family, that organism takes on the taint just as much as any individual. But that taint doesn’t necessarily mean the dissolution of the family; it might have an opposite effect, banding the family together even tighter than before. (I felt like shameful secrets had been aired publicly, and I was first of all defensive, protective.) In reality, I think both things happen: you’re pulled together, and that intense proximity exposes lines of cleavage that had begun cracking years earlier. The suicide is just a piece finally falling out. And from then on the family story can’t be the same. Its identity must include death, a death shared in the blood. The old narrative breaks at precisely the moment you need it to speak for you. This death, this suicide, is shattering to what, at that exact moment, is your deepest need—family, security, identity.

—

Rereading Buddy’s statement about his ability to detect authenticity, I find a harmonic floating just above the fundamental tone, and I think it can be heard distinctly in isolation here:

For the terrible and undiscountable fact has just reached me, between paragraphs, that I yearn to talk, to be queried, to be interrogated, about this particular dead man. It’s just got through to me, that apart ƒrom my many other—and, I hope to God, less ignoble—motives, I’m stuck with the usual survivor’s conceit that he’s the only soul alive who knew the deceased intimately. [my italics]

This is the overtone you hear in Salinger’s work, the knowingness, the high proud insistent certainty; and what accounts for the sound—the instrument, so to speak—is the faculty of mind that’s meant to sift through supposed facts and separate the truth from what’s false; and the tone is this, the belieƒ that he alone holds the key, the final authentic word on the deceased (or any other matter). The emphasis here is on the belief, not the particular key, whatever it may be. (And I want to make clear that for me this is a musical sound as much as a matter of content. It’s what makes Raise High the Rooƒ Beam, Carpenters nearly unreadable for me—too much snotty all-knowing prep-school smugness in the prose, a vague assumption of values, a social vulgarity found in the rich and privileged that’s just as revolting, and similar to, the arrogant know-nothingism of the various middle classes, upper to lower. Open the story to almost any page and you can hear the sound in the overpunctuated prose. It’s as if the pissy aggrieved prose itself were defending Seymour. You can even hear a trace of the problem in the quote above, in the word “undiscountable”—the leftover locution of a kid putting on adult airs, afraid that someone will realize he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.) And so, if there really is a single truth, and you alone possess it, there is also, by definition, a lot of falseness out there—the bulk of life, in fact. And this construction, this arrangement or priority, pitting the defense of your holy truth against the entire world’s falseness, is suicide refused, refused at least temporarily.

And it’s silence refused, too.

Here’s what I mean. A longstanding and widely accepted formulation is that suicide is redirected homicide. Edwin Shneidman, the father of the modern study of suicide, coined the phrase: “Suicide is murder in the 180th degree.” There are variations on this, of course. Suicide’s not always—probably never—an act of pure hostility. There’s a fairly old article by Ives Hendrick of the Harvard Medical School that argues the case for suicide as a form of identification with the lost love object, a fantasy of reunion rather than murder, and while this thinking doesn’t occupy a place in the fat mainstream of suicidology, it is accepted, a tributary that helps explain some cases. I’m throwing these ideas out scattershot, hoping to indicate a central theme within the wide range of psychodynamic meanings attributed to suicide: that it’s always accompanied by some shift away from life’s normal priority, where it’s perfectly natural and expected that you’d defend yourself from danger, to a condition where you give up, defenseless, or even join in on the attack. In Freud’s still-fascinating “Mourning and Melancholia,” he begins by openly admitting to being flummoxed by suicide and the self’s attack on itself. He says the ego is usually fierce and robust in the protection of itself, rallying the troops when under siege, so how or why does ego-functioning break down and become defenseless in the suicide? In short, the self can only hate the self to the point of suicide when a lost internalized object—an object, moreover, of love—turns against the self. In other words, it’s your inner daddy—protected by your love of him—messing with your defenseless inner child—or whatever, some variation of that. Later (1933), Karl Menninger develops his triadic theory of suicide—the wish to die, the wish to kill, the wish to be killed—to which, years afterward, he speculated on the need to add a fourth condition, the wish to be loved—and he talks about a mechanism by which the suicide’s “hostile component, since it would otherwise have to be directed against the whole world, is turned inward upon the self.” I’m really oversimplifying here, reducing complex theories into these candied bits, and I’m skipping the work of so many, of Maltsberger, Hendin, Leenars, Jamison, etc., but I’m trying to get at something, this general tendency in suicide, that will bring us back to Salinger.

In suicide, then, a couple of the main poles of life flip, and the desire to talk or communicate turns into a longing for a colossal silence (most suicides don’t write a note), and the fierce defense of the self becomes an equally fierce and final defeat. It’s like the mind, exhausted by the enormous work of defending itself, turns around out of some need for efficiency or economy, and begins hating itself, doubting or attacking its reality. Being suicidal is really tiring. A lot of suicides are so lethargic and lacking in affect they aren’t able to kill themselves until their mood improves—spring, for that reason, has the highest rate of what people in the business call “completed” suicides. The ego first tries to protect itself and then can’t, in part because to do so would be to attack a forbidden love object. (Buddy Glass says he can’t finish writing a description of Seymour, “even a bad description, even one where my ego, my perpetual lust to share top billing with him, is all over the place”—making a sideways admission of jealousy, and also expressing resentment for the sainted brother he can no longer defeat and no longer even describe without desecration.) What’s salient in The Catcher in the Rye is that Holden achieves a fragile truce between hating himself and hating the world. Holden Caulfield is probably identified in the minds of most readers as a boy whose anger at and suspicion of the world is fragilely offset by his inviolate love for Allie and Phoebe. As long as he keeps that love immaculate, as long as he defends and protects it and maintains its purity, he’s alive, and that’s what I mean by suicide refused. Holden without his holy love is a goner, and the unalloyed quality of that love is really the register of his isolation. He’s cornered, and you can see the gargantuan project he’s set for himself, that vast defense. In the novel he ends up in an institution which isn’t really a lasting solution to his problem but instead a sort of DMZ between himself and the world.

Similarly, Buddy Glass, a writer (in two other institutions, the military and the academy—and all these institutions, these supporting structures, stand in for a neutral family), asserts his identity by claiming close inner knowledge of his dead brother, Seymour. His relation to Seymour is sacerdotal and similar to the Holden Antolini says he can imagine dying nobly for an unworthy cause. But even in the passage quoted and italicized above, in the middle of his assertion, Buddy’s already begun to undermine it, calling it a “conceit,” an instance of cleverness that, but for the writer’s vigilance, would have hardened into a fixed posture, would have become false, phony. And I would argue that only a little farther down this line of thinking we come to the idea that all writing, fixed on the page, claiming truth, is false. It’s imaginable that a writer, in the wake of a suicide, might find all coherent narratives suspect, all postures false, and, looking at life up-close under a new magnifying hypervigilance, finally come to question and mistrust the integrity of his own inventions as well. The word “conceit” cancels Buddy’s claim to know Seymour, dismissing it and sending it on its way toward silence. And silence—a kind of reunion with Seymour, or a way to equal or defeat him, head to head, silence for silence—is one possible response to this powerful but confused idea of falsity. If The Catcher in the Rye is noisy in its search for authenticity, then the rest of Salinger’s work looks for the real by stilling the very engine that drives Holden’s vast doubt—words. And this silence is related to and yet something beyond the interest in Zen quietude that crops up in Salinger’s later work.

—

Holden’s isolation in an institution as he tells his story points to a formal problem Salinger himself seems to have resolved through withdrawal and writerly silence. At least it’s tempting to see it that way. I’ve poked around in all the work for prodromal clues somehow indicating Salinger’s plunge into silence was symptomatic of something. What is the silence about? In some people (usually willful or grandiose or highly defended types) there’s only a very small difference between talking incessantly and saying nothing. I vaguely remember a quote from Roland Barthes, who claimed his rhetorical needs alternated between a little haiku that expressed everything and a great flood of banalities that said nothing. And in Seymour—An Introduction, Buddy Glass says of his brother, “Vocally, he was either as brief as a gatekeeper at a Trappist monastery—sometimes for days, weeks at a stretch—or he was a non-stop talker.” Interestingly, The Catcher in the Rye, Salinger’s most voluble book, begins and ends with specific comments concerning what will not be written.

Holden starts his story with a refusal:

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.

The quotes above bracket the book, suggesting prohibitions of both point of view and content. Holden will not look at the life of his parents or take the tack of examining his past or childhood—this is no remembrance—and by the end of the novel his instinct, in a sense, proves him right, proves that the process of writing only creates further problems. He’s not newly wise like Nick Carraway. He has no new perspective or understanding. The only thing Holden seems to learn from telling even this restricted story is that, confirming his first hunch, it would have been better to say nothing.

Silence is already there, waiting in the wings of Salinger’s most clamorous and fluent book.

Is silence for a writer tantamount to suicide? In some ways it is, I believe, but the question for me is why—why does the writer choose silence? The deliberate decision to quit clawing at the keyboard is too mechanical to be an answer. Stopping isn’t the real matter, but rather the result of some other prior disturbance that can’t be named. Silence in this sense isn’t the equivalent of suicide or death, but of secrecy. That’s what it’s about—what is not said. Taking Salinger’s oeuvre as a unified field, I find a couple elements that don’t square with either my experience or my avocational reading in the literature of suicide—elements where a silence rules. He never really looks at the role of parents in family life, and never examines, in particular, their position re. Seymour’s suicide. It’s a substantial omission, and perhaps not an omission at all but instead a protective silence. I don’t know, and on this point I don’t care to speculate beyond the observation that, in general, people from good, functioning families rarely kill themselves. And in crappy, broken-down families a child’s attention is often focused on nothing but the parents. Suffice it to say there’s something big missing in Salinger’s account. And the other thing not present in Salinger’s work is outright anger toward Seymour or a sense of doubt about him. As Buddy describes him, Seymour really has no flaws at all, and to me this absence of flaws and of anger and doubt is a texture that’s conspicuously absent. Why? I can’t say, although I feel the effects. In Seymour—An Introduction Buddy never lets the reader forget that he, Buddy, is sitting alone at his desk, writing. It’s all just writing, he wants us to know, the lumber of it, the cut and stacked phrases, the punctuation nailed to the paper, the parentheses put up to frame different doubts, etc.—as if to say this project, this monument under construction, will always fall short of honoring the actual character. Where Holden insists on Phoebe’s innocence and pretty easily posits an idea of her essence, Buddy sees past his brother into the conceits and constructions that create him on the page. And because of this, perhaps, Seymour never feels real, never seems to emerge from the workbench of the writer, to live and walk among men.

The writer won’t or can’t let him die:

What I am, I think, is a thesaurus of undetached prefatory remarks about him. I believe I essentially remain what I’ve almost always been—a narrator, but one with extremely pressing personal needs. I want to introduce, I want to describe, I want to distribute momentos, amulets, I want to break out my wallet and pass around snapshots, I want to follow my nose.

Here again you get a kind of intense identification with Seymour, one that blocks Buddy’s way—he’s “undetached,” he has “pressing personal needs,” and because of this he can only make “prefatory” remarks. The isolated I am is telling; with the comma where it is, the weight of the sentence remains stuck to the subject, rather than shifting forward via the verb to its object. The I am seems open-ended, perpetual. (Is time taken out of the sentence because the writer won’t let history happen, won’t let his character die? It’s curious that in a life that’s ended, that’s so emphatically finished, the writer can’t begin, can’t offer anything more than an introduction. Would finishing Seymour mean outliving him? Or the converse: does failing to finish Seymour leave him alive?) The identity thing here is ruthless, close, smothering, endless. Consider that quote and the problem when set beside this:

. . . I privately say to you, old friend (unto you, really, I’m afraid), please accept from me this unpretentious bouquet of very early-blooming parentheses: (((( )))). I suppose, most unflorally. I truly mean them to be taken, first off, as bow-legged—buckle-legged—omens of my state of mind and body at this writing.

There’s that cowardly, obfuscating “un-” construction—unpreten-tious, unflorally—cropping up again (which nearly always works as a mask, sneaky and meaning the very opposite of what it states; meaning, in this case, pretentious, floral), but the point now is to draw attention to the parentheses. (Although in working through various drafts of this essay I realized my second paragraph was full of precisely this construction. It appears five times, and occupies the privileged key position as the last word in the paragraph. It crossed my mind to correct the problem by burying it in some low geological stratum of the piece, but I haven’t. There’s that desire in writing, as in life, to rewind everything after a suicide, to return to some pristine moment, and so in this, too, Salinger’s mon ƒrere, ma semblable.) The parentheses sit like Kevlar jackets all through the writing, protecting Buddy’s identity from attack, keeping the sentences safe. Seymour—An Introduction is like a story in hiding, its prose on the lam, its characters putting on disguises, its ideas concealed. The whole thing is preambular, it’s all excursus, and it’s a bad sign that for me the best or most accurate language for describing the story comes from classical rhetoric and oratory. The sentences spin eloquently over an absence—it’s as if progress has stopped, and the last few words are draining out. Earlier I said that Holden is making a loud shouted appeal directly to the audience, over the heads of those who don’t understand. The whole story is directed at you, the reader. In Seymour Buddy Glass speaks directly to the reader too, but now he resorts to the aside, the isolated whispered phrase, safely enclosed in parentheses, addressing the audience in a low voice supposedly inaudible to others nearby.

Who is nearby?

I know: his brother.

—

Salinger isn’t primarily a funny writer, and humor, except sporadically in The Catcher in the Rye, is largely absent from his work. His primary thing is empathy, the yearning for it, the hope and the need, both as giver and receiver. Buddy’s desire for empathic union with his brother is single-minded and loyal and makes for an interesting case, but Seymour never finally comes to life. The book is one long stutter and a fascinating failure. Buddy can’t write Seymour because, when he tries, Seymour fragments and falls apart—you get the parts, you get the eyes, the nose, the voice, etc. He wants his brother so bad, it’s a sad thing to watch, to see Seymour breaking to pieces in Buddy’s hands. The Salinger I’ve been discussing seems at times to feel he’s got a corner on The Truth, this unwieldy lump he keeps hidden like the kid with the secret goldfish in D.B.’s story, who won’t show it to anybody because he bought it with his own money. Perhaps this Truth is centrally important because the suicide takes his secret with him, and it’s easy to get caught up in a monomaniacal search for The Answer, pinning your painfully vast hope to a single Idea. Up to a point, you believe the person who killed himself took the ultimate truth, and life afterward often feels like a sorrowful search for that last, unknown key to the life, which will explain everything. The paradox is that this hope or need for certainty seems to make the world less stable. The belief in a single Truth leads to doubt about everything. The need for empathic union makes the actual separation just terribly, terribly huge.

When we shift the relationship away from Buddy-Seymour to Salinger-Holden, then, as an act of writing, Salinger’s empathy for Holden Caulfield makes The Catcher in the Rye something special, an intense and fierce and intimate look at a character who arouses in readers—in me, let’s say—a level of sympathetic identification nearly equal to the one felt for Fitzgerald’s Gatsby.

After my brother’s death I felt I had too much feeling to be myself. I felt attacked by my emotions, under siege, and the sensation, day after day, was like life had stuck to me. Like it was pinned to my back. This whatever, this stab of feeling, probably influenced the fate of the doomed robin. I could have stood by until the crow killed it, or sat still until somebody a little more altruistic came down the street and stepped in to save it, rushing the bird off to a Humane Society shelter; or someone else could have come down the street, this time in a car, and run it over. Lots of things could have happened. But instead, I scooped the bird up in my Filson cap, folding the hat like a taco shell so it couldn’t escape, and carried it to a vacant lot with a weedy path that led down to the lake. For some reason I thought the crow might follow us, but crows are comical birds and that one’s interest had already moved on to something new. I walked into the murky water of Lake Union, my mind blank, and, bending down, dunked the hat under. The bird was still trying to fly, brushing its one good wing against the fabric, and when that stopped I pulled my hat away. The robin floated to the surface, lifelessly riding the tiny waves, and I smacked the hat against my leg, knocking beads of water off the waxed cotton. I picked a few gray feathers from the inner brim and put the hat on, looking west across the water to the Aurora Bridge. And while now the bridge reminds me of my brother Mike, comically pratfalling through an indifferent universe, back then it made me think of Danny, tragically dead at twenty-one after shooting himself in my bedroom.

With Danny, years have passed and I still feel a deathly guilt. I never did anything but love my brother and that wasn’t enough. And now every breath I take is a betrayal, a refusal of his choice. It’s not sentimental indulgence, it’s not so much that I ask myself what happened to the hand I held in crosswalks, but rather that I cross all those streets again. I stay with him now, I’m always nearby. I am always ten and he is always three, and I sit in the kitchen spooning canned peas into his mouth, swallowing most of them myself, and he gets a bowl of spumoni for being a good boy and eating his vegetables. I’m with him and I never feel like I belong entirely to present-day life. I’ve never really held a serious job or applied myself to anything worthwhile, I’m an unreliable, shitty friend, and I’ve never loved anyone deeply or satisfactorily. Killing the robin was an early experiment in grieving and acceptance that didn’t work too well. I knew the bird had no life ahead of it, and I wanted to anticipate that doom rather than stand off at a safe distance. I didn’t want to be uncertain. But where before I had too much feeling, after drowning the bird I felt nothing, I was indifferent, I was remorseless. I thought I could rejoin the universe by being cruel and unfeeling, but obviously I was having trouble with focal distance and zeroing in on the exact right place where most of life was happening.

Here is a quote from Dietrich Bonhoeffer that I treasure for capturing one side of how I feel. It gets me closer to acceptance and understanding than anything else. It’s from his Letters & Papers ƒrom Prison, and written, I think, at a time when he knew he would die in the concentration camp, so he speaks from inside the heart of his death:

Nothing can make up for the absence of someone whom we love, and it would be wrong to try to find a substitute; we must simply hold out and see it through. That sounds very hard at first, but at the same time it is a great consolation, for the gap, as long as it remains unfulfilled, preserves the bonds between us. It is nonsense to say that God fills the gap. God doesn’t fill it, but on the contrary, keeps it empty and so helps us to keep alive our former communion with each other, even at the cost of pain.

From the get-go, my brother Mike’s suicide attempt struck me as a piece of comedy. Maybe that’s because it came to me like the comedian’s idea of the topper, the rule that says you follow up a good joke with a second, even better joke. Keep them laughing! Maybe it’s because I always picture Mike tumbling haplessly through space, and falls are a staple of comedy and clowning, as is anything that turns the body into an object. Maybe it’s because when he jumped over the rail he was being chased by the devil and then he was aware, halfway down, that the devil was gone and he was all alone, falling like a rock. Or maybe, as in King Lear, it’s just too much, and the wise man sees life like the fool and laughs, either that or he cracks. Mike was really wrecked-up, his body broken, and when I saw him at the VA hospital he had nuts and bolts and this kind of light-gauge medical rebar rising like a scaffolding from his smashed pelvis. His right shoulder was immobilized, so that, in combination with the broken pelvis, and his ruined bladder, which was being drained by a catheter, he seemed like just another malfunctioning contraption or a Rube Goldberg contrivance. At home we always had old jalopy equipment like black and white televisions with no horizontal hold and our cars were ancient and unreliable and broken-down—in one of our cars the transmission would overheat and the carpet in the backseat would catch fire and smolder on any drive longer than ten miles, so we did the obvious thing, we kept a jug of water in the car. In the hospital Mike looked to me just like another one of our crappy busted things, where the attempt at repair was funny in a way that the initial problem was not. Whereas I remember helping Danny eat his peas, I remember laughing at Mike as he tried to get a hamburger to his mouth. I sat in a chair and watched. He couldn’t do it—you can’t sit up straight with a broken pelvis—and his mouth and the hamburger just hung there, apart from each other, it seemed, for all time.

And so over here, Henri Bergson’s essay on the comic suggests another side, a possible path for me in my ongoing attempt to understand life by reading books:

. . . I would point out . . . the absence of feeling which usually accompanies laughter. . . . Indifference is its natural environment, for laughter has no greater foe than emotion. . . . In a society composed of pure intelligences there would probably be no more tears, though perhaps there would still be laughter; whereas highly emotional souls, in tune and unison with life, in whom every event would be sentimentally prolonged and re-echoed, would neither know nor understand laughter.

Put in a slightly different way, it was Charlie Chaplin, I think, who said that life up-close is a tragedy, but from a distance it’s a comedy. Somebody slipping on a banana peel is still funny, unless it’s you. And the genius of Salinger is that, speaking through Holden Caulfield, highly emotional, in tune and unison with life, with events re-echoing still, he told us exactly what it feels like to feel too much.

Charles D’Ambrosio is the author two collections of short stories, The Point (a finalist for the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award) and The Dead Fish Museum (a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award), as well as the essay collection Orphans. His work has appeared frequently in The New Yorker, as well as in Tin House, The Paris Review, Zoetrope All-Story, A Public Space, and Story. He’s been the recipient of the Whiting Writers’ Award, an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Lannan Foundation Fellowship, and a USA Rasmuson Fellowship. Loitering: New and Collected Essays will be published by Tin House Books in November 2014. He lives in Portland, OR.

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